On 20.04.2010, at 17:25, Hannes Hirzel wrote:
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/20100419/0...
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.htm...
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.
IMHO discussion of documentation should happen here on squeak-dev. It concerns everyone.
The beginner's list is a place to get advice, not to discuss features or strategies.
- Bert -