Re: Making scripts with sawfish-client

[Geoff Kuenning <geoff cs hmc edu>]

I don't think it's particularly inviting to outsiders if we get
defensive about perfectly reasonable questions and criticisms.

The reality is that sawfish, like many (or most) open-source projects,
could benefit from quite a bit more documentation.  The UI to the
window manager itself is reasonably well covered by the texinfo
manual.  But the stuff in librep is discussed only in documentation
strings.  That brings up the classic elisp problem: doc strings tend
to be terse, and you often can't even find out that a function exists
unless you already have a good guess as to its name.

As the original poster said:

> In our case, what we need is a clear documentation about how to use the
> tools. That means tutorials and howto, and not an API list (that will be
> maybe useful, but later).

That stuff doesn't exist at all.  If it _did_ exist, sawfish would be
much more widely used.  How successful do you think Python would be if
there was nothing except a brief listing of library functions with
2-line descriptions?

It's reasonable to respond that nobody has written anything and nobody
has volunteered to do so.  But it's counterproductive to claim that
nothing needs to be written, or to suggest that the solution to such
problems is to make everybody figure it out themselves.
-- 
    Geoff Kuenning   geoff cs hmc edu   http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/

Have I mentioned that I hate computers?
	-- Drew Bernat, HMC '99