Re: Is your package really documented? The truth

On Apr 30, 2004, at 9:38 AM, Bertrand Mansion wrote:

The fact that you are working on writing missing documentation is very good, that's not what I am worried about. It is also great that you are volunteer to convert wiki written documentation to docbook.

I too applaud David's work here. It is tedious and grueling, and all too often thankless. Good show, man! :-)

But I think that's maybe relying on you too much and one of these days, you might be too busy to take care of that, especially with 139 (and more coming) missing docs. So at the moment, I see your solution as a placebo to a bigger problem.

Not sure it's a placebo, but at least he's doing *something* to try to alleviate the problem. His work may or may not be the best or complete solution, but it is certain to lead us to a good solution faster than doing nothing. Again, well-done to David for taking the initiative.

If in the end everything is written in the wiki, then why not use the wiki directly ?

An excellent question; why not? ;-) One of the benefits of the specific wiki David has chosen (Yawiki, still in development) is that it uses Text_Wiki; one of the stated goals of Text_Wiki is to provide rendering of DocBook output. It's not there yet, but that's because I don't know DocBook that well (read "at all" ;-) and because I am documenting the code base of Yawp and Yawiki even now. The combination of the AreaMap in Yawiki to provide hierarchy, with some (perhaps specialized) rendering rules will let user write in Wiki and convert to DocBook as needed. It may require some tweaking of Yawiki to support 250+ areas, but that might be a template-display issue and not a codebase issue. As always, this is just a thought, but readers of PEAR-DOC will know that the documentation issue has been a big deal for me recently, so this is not just idle talk from me. And I can't say it enough: David is doing great work here. Thanks, David. -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty for PHP. http://phpsavant.com/ DB_Table: build RDBMS tables and XHTML forms in one PHP class. http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?area=DB_Table Yawiki: your collaborative online documentation system. http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?area=Yawiki