users manual / developers manual

From: Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 11:06:42 +0000
Subject: users manual / developers manual
Groups: php.doc 
Request: Send a blank email to phpdoc+get-969351217@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message
Hi! I am opening this up as a new thread, so we can start in a clean situation to discuss only this problem. What's wrong? The current manual contains developers information (Zend engine internals, streams development), which is not for users. Some users may get confused with them (especially with streams now introduced in PHP 4.3.0). Manual searches may return results in those pages, and users can unintentionally get into it... The solution Have a separate users manual and developers manual. Technical side Most of the current manual stays in the users manual. The dev. part goes into the developers manual. It is discussed that the dev manual should not be translated, as it would make crap appear in the CVS of PHP4/5, as some outdated docs may be used to develop an extension (this is an issue currently too with ZE1 docs). Also someone who develops and extension needs to know English, as all the current code, comments in them, etc. are in English, and someone who works with PHP development, always needs to dig up some details in the code, as there will always be undocumented parts. We also would not like to split the efforrts of translation groups, they should focus on the users documentation only. There is enough to translate there. Should the dev manual have it's own CVS repository with it's own build system? Probably not for the first time. I think it may go into phpdoc/devmanual/* and if it grows to something reasonable, then it should go alone. This also means that the build system needs to be extended to choose what manual you would like to build (in the configure step). Here are my thoughts. It is important to make up an RFC of this, as we discussed, so the results will stay at some place, and there would be no need to restart this again, and again... Goba

« previous php.doc (#969351217) next »