Re: Next release from master

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2016 05:33:13 +0200
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> I'm sure Eli (and the rest of us) would be very happy to see you help with documentation.

Indeed; volunteers welcome.

However, the best person to write documentation of a feature is the
one who made the change, and the best time to do that is as part of or
immediately following the development, when all the details are still
fresh in that person's memory.  If Someone Else™ has to do that, that
someone needs to reverse-engineer the changes, look for and browse old
discussions and bug reports, try the new feature to fill the gaps in
the doc strings, etc. etc., just to make sense of what was done and
why, and figure out which parts are important enough to be in the
manuals.  Sometimes, doing all that takes a few moments, but more
often it can take hours or days.

It is much more efficient if the original developer provides some
documentation, even if it's not good English and without Texinfo
markup, because adding markup and rephrasing is a mostly mechanical
process that can be done very quickly and without the need to research
issues closed many moons ago.

Thanks.