This is kind of a hand-wavy issue in that it's hard to discern when it's "completed". I vote we can use a gut feeling to decide one way or the other.

Thus this bug is for helping to figure out what goes into the Hacking HOWTO and making sure it gets there.

For April 30th, we want a Hacking HOWTO chapter in the documentation that covers the following:

1. how to build a working development environment for GNU MediaGoblin
2. how to run GNU MediaGoblin in a development environment (the deployment howto covers how to run it in a production environment)
3. how to contribute patches
4. where to look for things to work on
5. where to look for help when you're stuck

The document is in the mediagoblin repository in docs/hackinghowto.rst .

One of the things we're adding to the manual is a chapter on design decisions. This is important for two reasons:

1. people new to the project can read it, learn what we've decided so far, and why
2. people new to the project can glean more about how we plan to do what we're doing
3. head off "why didn't you do xyz?" questions which the project team has discussed, decided, and moved on
4. gives us a good resource for re-evaluating decisions later on down the road when necessary
5. gives people working on other projects a good resource for working through these sorts of decisions more quickly for their project

For April 30th, we need to do the following:

1. format the question and answer sections in an appropriate way
2. add sections that should be covered that aren't yet
3. add a workflow bit at the bottom for how to add questions in the future

The documentation will have a howto on contributing. This is in addition to the hacking howto. We decided last week that it was a good idea to have two separate chapters so that we can more easily focus on getting non-code contributors into the project.

For April 30th, the contributing howto should have the following sections:

1. filing bugs
2. translating
3. hacking -- which refers to the hacking howto
4. theming -- which refers to the theming howto (which will be a stub for April 30th)
5. where to go when you get stuck

We should have a section for each kind of work we need help with. What other sections should it have?

Adding everyone to the watch list on this one because it needs more thought.