On 2013-06-14 15:51:14 +0000, Gabriele Svelto said:

Will this documentation be oriented towards developers who might actually want to work on the B2G core (gecko, gonk, platform stuff, porting, etc...)?

Yes, some of it. This documentation is for people that want to work on B2G core, porting, and customizing the OS for new phones and carriers.

There's quite a few areas of our code which will appear pretty obscure to anybody seeing them for the first time without some form of documentation. I was working myself on a document on our memory management policies which would cover low-memory detection, memory pressure events, OOM killer policy, priorities and so on.

Yes; that's what we're trying to fix. Having docs like that on MDN would be a big help for newcomers.

The biggest problem with this kind of documentation is that it always risks ending up outdated; how do we encourage developers to keep it up to date once it's done? Outdated documentation can often be worse than no documentation at all and B2G has been a pretty fast moving target until this point.

One way to help relieve that is to provide overviews on MDN, with links to the appropriate source code so people can see the latest material for themselves. If the code is well documented in and of itself (which usually Mozilla's code is not, unfortunately), that can work well.

Otherwise, we have to incentivize developers to help us keep the code up to date. We're working on tools to help make that easier. One thing we hope to do eventually is actually have it so documents can be "linked" to source files, so that when that source changes, a flag goes up on the doc to indicate that it should be checked to be sure it's not out of date.

--
Eric Shepherd
Developer Documentation Lead
Mozilla
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: @sheppy

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