[squeak-dev] Documentation Team

Hannes Hirzel hannes.hirzel at gmail.com
Tue Apr 20 15:25:00 UTC 2010


Hello

As we now have this nice help menu I think we should make use of it.
New versions of the texts there may be easily put as an mcz file into
the inbox and show up there for people connected to the trunk. So it
will be under version control and considered to be a regular Squeak
artifact. This is for the basic documentation including hooks and
loading procedures.

Additional documentation could be done in the form of some packages on
Squeaksource which people may load on demand.

A simple reader might be used for displaying the information.  A
three-pane browser like
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/attachments/20100419/0ea15bf9/PastedGraphic-1.png

If somebody wants to go for immediate action: What about taking that
and using it for displaying the Terse Guide of Squeak? Maybe somebody
likes to put this into the inbox?

I think documentation _in_ the image is important. The goal of
documentation is to save time. If I for myself need several hours to
find out a procedure, the next person does not need to have the same
struggle. A few lines of text save ofther people a lot of struggle

e.g. the installation of Pier2
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-April/148974.html


The nice thing people often forget is that any text may be selected
and executed. This is something to really make use of.
And: documentation should be loadable and unloadable like other modules.

I am willing to contribute if meaningful transactions (of
contributions) may be done within 30 minutes to 3 hours.

Best wishes

Hannes

P.S.1 I think we should revive the documentation mailing list and have
the discussion there to reduce the load on this list.

P.S. 2
Or the beginner's list might be a place as well for this as it is not
crowded and there would be "customers".  The term 'beginner' might
frighten some people who have been around for a long time. Anyhow if I
do not know how something works in a particular area I am a beginner
in that area. And the system is actually huge. In which other system
are you allowed to tweak the GUI library for example.

On 4/20/10, Michael Haupt <mhaupt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Casey,
>
> with all the documentation-related blurb I posted during campaigning,
> you got me started naturally. This is a very good idea. :-)
>
> What are your plans? What form of documentation do you envision, and
> what kind? How would you try to get people contribute documentation
> instead of just code? What do you think about making documentation
> available both in- and outside the image? Packageable?
>
> Sorry for the many questions, but this *is* an important topic IMHO,
> and I care. :-)
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:24 PM, Casey Ransberger
> <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Looking at
>> http://squeak.org/Community/Teams/
>> I don't see a documentation team listed. Has it been disbanded?
>> If the documentation team has been disbanded, I would like to offer to
>> lead
>> a new documentation team (in which case I would draft up a proposal with
>> expected deliverables, etc.) If the documentation team has not been
>> disbanded, I would like to join it.
>
>



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