G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 11:43 +0200, Frank Peters wrote:
Gerry,
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.
you have probably misunderstand us or me and if there are still some
open questions from your side please ask. I will try to clarify
everything and Frank pointed out again that the work on open sourcing
the DevGuide and other docs is ongoing.
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.
why off list, if you have criticism you should bring it up here that
everybody can share your view or that we can discuss it public.
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.
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.
- 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.
The DevGuide is already structured this way, one document per chapter
and a master document to combine them into one document.
I assume Frank mentioned more a real splitting into smaller guides. For
example one introduction, one UNO guide, one writer guide and so on.
Think about a DevGuide collection 1 - X
- 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
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.
- create docs for creating OOo extensions
Now this might be interesting. We, as a project, have not visited teh
extensions/addon question for awhile.
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.
you misunderstand the irony ;-)
It doesn't make sense to create a second DevGuide. We should definitely
combine our efforts on one guide.
Juergen
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