G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
There seems to be some problems with the current DevGuide that are
political and proprietary in nature. Sun produces this guide. While this
can you please elaborate? What kind of problems?
Are you sure you want to know? I do not think the reasons need be
discussed on this list. They have been discussed on another list and the
result is this request to start preparing an OpenOffice.org Dev Guide.
guide has a five year head start, it seems to me that we might be able
to create an acceptable guide and avoid the nonsense.
What do you mean by "nonsense"?
Off list if you want details.
I don't see why the project that is supposed to approach this
should not know for what reason. I apologize if this was
discussed here before. Do you have a pointer?
Let's have some ideas. If there are any takers, I can set up a task and
a master document with which to start.
Let me emphasize that producing a Developer's Guide from scratch
is far from being an easy task. The original dev guide (now
1,000+ pages) was created by three full time authors over a period
of several months. Without close relationship to the developers
this is a hard thing to do.
Have I said it would be easy? No. What I ask is that the idea be
examined. Your comments are part of that evaluation process.
As mentioned in my previous replies (to later postings) we
will open source the dev guide in the mid future but it still
needs a considerable amount of maintenance work. So there will
be loads of opportunities to work on developer docs.
Well this would be good. If the doc project goes ahead and gets some
decent words down. We could examine merging at that point or whatever.
Why wouldn't we just build on what's there instead of restarting?
Apart from that, we should start discussing a strategy around
this type of docs instead of just starting off. Even with a
dev guide there are still huge gaps in the dev doc space that
should be identified and closed:
- we have the in-depth dev guide that is very detailed
and highly technical for the geeks among us.
- we also have the (StarOffice) BASIC guide as an entry level doc
We are working on addressing this.
- there is Andrew Pitonyak's excellent macro document
I agree it is excellent. However it is Andrew's and, at this point, we
at the doc project have not approached him about formalizing it in the
documentation set. We have chosen, rather, to host it.
- cross references VBA<->BASIC on docs.oo.o
In the works.
That's good to know. Where are these works documented?
Can one see what's in the works and where it is?
- online help content for BASIC runtime functions
- and the hacker's wiki
We can have a look at these.
This looks sort of unsorted to me. If we could work out a plan
and identify what we would need to complement the existing
docs that would be great. Possible tasks in this area would
encompass
- split up the dev guide to make it less monolithic
You mean like a master doc and chapters? Excellent idea. I used the
monolithic approach with the 1.1.x guide and found it unsatisfactory.
The 2.x guide is master and chapters.
No, I mean creating several smaller guides addressing sub-topics.
The dev guide already is a master document but getting to be big
to be easily manageable both from an author's and from a reader's
point of view.
- merge BASIC guide and macro information
Maybe useful, maybe not. Creating a document that addresses only
OOoBASIC macros might not be the best approach. However, that
What else would you like to include?
considered, a macro handbook that goes beyond our existing HOW-TOs would
be a definite asset.
- create a OOo macro cookbook
Not sure about this one. On the surface, a good idea but I think that
the limited target audience is well served by the wiki and lists.
Why would that target audience be so limited? In my experience
most of the folks that do use macro functionality start off
based on examples.
I am not saying that the wiki is a bad place for this info.
We just should have a central access to this and not let the
folks wander around to find stuff. Not everyone is comfortable
with mailing lists.
- create docs for creating OOo extensions
Now this might be interesting. We, as a project, have not visited teh
extensions/addon question for awhile.
On OOoCon2006, this was one of the central topics and from a
strategic point of view, it is planned to be the future for OOo.
It is a very exciting topic, also. Extensions would allow
folks to contribute without touching the inner circle of
OOo source code. Lots of functionality and little tools
could easily be distributed. And you may know from projects
like Thunderbird and Firefox, that a lot of these little goodies
are simple an easy, yet powerful helpers.
I confess that some of the tasks depend on Sun open sourcing the
guides and I apologize for the delays but I can assure you that
we're working on this.
So I was told. Along with a suggestion that we should have a look at
creating our own.
Who made that suggestion?
Frank
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