2010/4/30 Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com>:
> Ian, thanks. Comments inline.

My pleasure, I like plans. :)

> Somehow I doubt we'll have a documentation-frenzy. That would be a momentous
> day in software history, and a great problem to have.

That's not what your plan said. As I wrote, it's a bit
overenthusiastic for a period of one year. My point was simply that a
spellchecker is important and it will make a difference over time. We
both agree on this. Fine. :)

> Okay, I would love to have a spell checker in Squeak. It would need to be:
>  - Easy to install. I'm thinking, MC package. Requiring a VM primitive would
> set the barrier for contribution too high IMHO.
>  - It should be easily unloadable (many of us probably have no use for a
> spell checker in our images.)

The easiest approach would probably be to use an existing system, such
as hunspell. It has been used with many systems (OO.o, Firefox, Opera)
and many programming languages. There are probably all the compiled
libraries needed to interface with. It comes with many dictionaries in
various languages.

> I don't know of a spell checker implementation for Squeak. Is there one out
> there? If not, can you implement one and then get back to me right away? :P

Neither do I know.


> Agreed. I just sent another message about this.

Yes, great. :)

>> > 3. Consider first method comments which show up in tools that can
>> > extract
>> > them.
>>
>> Another suggestion: we should have something to tell us how much
>> documentation coverage we have. This set an objective to our
>> community: having 100% coverage.
>
> This is actually something that I thought about doing. I'd call it a strong
> nice-to-have. This one seems like it wouldn't be that hard to pull off,
> either.
> Coverage is kind of a funny metric though. 100% coverage is great to have,
> but doesn't tell you anything about the quality of your coverage.

You're correct about quality. My idea is to set an objective first and
foremost. We could define basic requirements for comments. I see
online help often have something to rate the help page they have been
reading (“How useful this entry was?” 1 – Useless, 5 – Excellent). We
could consider something along this line.

Ian.
-- 
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/