Re: Documentation

[Adam Atlas]

On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 08:53  PM, Alexander Malmberg wrote:

> Sounds a bit chaotic, but it might work in the early stages :). In 
> time,
> we might want to have stricter control over what goes in the 'real'
> documentation, although a way of adding comments to pages you can't
> modify would still be useful. Distribution in different formats,
> off-line viewing, and printing are also potential issues. I'm afraid I
> don't know that much about Wikis, but the concept sounds very
> interesting. Is there one that can handle all this?

It doesn't have to be chaotic. If you didn't, take a look at Cocoadev 
(http://www.cocoadev.com). That's more of a discussion and community 
site than a documentation site: the most they have in terms of 
documentation is usually a link to Apple's page about it. To see an 
example of how Cocoadev works, try looking at 
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSObject , or, for that matter 
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?GNUstep . It can be effective for 
documentation, though, as long as it's clear that's what the site is 
about.

Or look at Wikipedia, probably the best proof that Wiki works. It's an 
effort to write an encyclopedia from scratch using Wiki, completely by 
volunteer contributors, and so far, it's been very successful.

As I said, most implementations of Wiki store complete revision 
history. If we were to set up a Wiki, it could be up-to-the-minute 
contributed and official documentation, and then the GNUstep developers 
could decide what goes into the official documentation.

--Adam

--
Adam Atlas

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes 
and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum 
tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949