Re: How to port applets to GNOME2 (again)

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net> writes:

> Ole Laursen writes:
> > 
> > I don't why the documentation situation isn't improved. 
> 
> With all due respect, the documentation situation isn't improved because
> you didn't do it.

I know that. I also knew my statement could sound offensive. But IMHO
you don't release a library without providing at least basic
documentation.

Before I switched to Linux and Gnome, I was using a fairly extensive
game programming library (Allegro) that always had complete
documentation. Guess what? All add-on libraries also had complete
documentation, even if it was written in bad English.

This may sound harsh, but frankly I think the only reason the
reference documentation situation isn't improved is that people here
in Gnome land don't give it priority because there's no pressure to do
so. Perhaps the improved GTK+ documentation is going to change that.

> I don't mean to sound facetious here. One way to see improved
> developer documentation is to whine and wait for the maintainers to
> do it for you. Another way is to figure out how the damn thing works
> and contribute yourself to improve the documentation. A number of
> our packages have been greatly improved by people other than the
> package's core maintainer helping to improve the documentation. This
> is a great way people other than core package maintainers can give
> back to the project.

I don't know how most of our core technologies actually work because
the documentation has been lacking. So I could spend weeks
investigating that before getting to a point where I could help
document. It is an evil circle. I could spend the same amount of time
much more productive working one of my own Gnome applications. My time
is precious, too. :-)

I have in fact contributed documentation for gtkmm which I understand
better. I've forgotton how to think in plain C, too.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/