Re: Developer Documentation Plan



On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 21:05 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> For the last week, I've been putting together a comprehensive
> plan to overhaul and update our developer documentation.  My
> plan is on live.gnome.org:
> 
> http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Planning/DeveloperDocs

*snip*

> Comments, suggestions, and flames are absolutely welcome.  Our
> community is what makes us who we are.

I don't think I'll have time to work on any of this (sorry), but I had a
few thoughts when reading through your plan:

How does the rearrangement/splitting up of reference pages tie in with
Devhelp? The new hierarchy seems to be a lot more non-linear, with links
going between tree branches, and I can foresee a little awkwardness
trying to fit that into Devhelp's current navigation model (i.e.
entirely tree-based). At the very least, Devhelp's tab support will have
to be improved for this to be usable.

I like the idea of hiding the documentation for getters/setters with the
documentation for their respective properties, but what should be done
about getters/setters which affect more than one property, or properties
which are affected by more than one getter/setter? (e.g. An object has X
and Y coordinate properties, but it makes sense for it to only have
get_coordinate_pair() and set_coordinate_pair() functions.)

How about extending gtk-doc's idea of API reference completeness so that
only APIs which have full gobject-introspection (or similar) annotations
are considered complete? I often find that, even if an API reference is
complete in the traditional sense, I end up searching through the
library's code to find out whether I should be freeing the return value
of a function, and the appropriate free function to use when doing so.
Mandating that all functions have the ownership of their return
variables documented (e.g. using gobject-introspection annotations)
would be of great help.

Moving on from that, it would be nice if the new API documentation style
used gobject-introspection annotations better, and presented them as if
they weren't just an afterthought (like here[1]).

I like the plan as a whole, though. Just some food for thought. :-)

Regards,
Philip

[1]:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkListStore.html#gtk-list-store-set-column-types

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