Re: Re: Livedocs

On Feb 23, 2004, at 11:51 AM, Sérgio Carvalho wrote:

There's a fundamental point here. Aren't PEAR end-users all developers? We don't need those "Teach Yourself In 21 Days" 15kg books for PEAR.

Yes we do!!! PEAR users are not a monolithic whole. There are new users all the time who don't know a thing about PEAR or any of the packages. PEAR docs need to be written for those new user. Remember when you started? You didn't know *anything*. Neither did I, and neither did anyone else. Lack of good user docs is a barrier to use; "we're all developers here" is not a valid point.

All that's needed is a kickstart tutorial and up to date reference. I personally don't need anything else to use a library (bar examples, which come in handy when evaluating alternatives).

You personally may not, but almost everybody else does. When I look at a package the first thing I want to see are examples, more being better. Sometimes I have a solution that I want to make an example of, and I want to add it to the docs, but I can't because of the current system.

I'd be very very glad if all PEAR packages had these minimum-level docs. A very big lot doesn't have a line of documentation...

It will be a good start. If docs are easier to write (Wiki!) then more will appear; not all, but more than there are now. -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/