Re: documentation

From: Andrus Adamchik (andru..bjectstyle.org)
Date: Tue May 26 2009 - 03:52:36 EDT

  • Next message: Andrus Adamchik: "Re: [VOTE] Cayenne 3.0M6"

    I am +0 on that.

    As long as we maintain separate doc branches on the site for the
    *major* releases, changes in the docs between the minor versions can
    be reasonably reflected in a single set of docs. Essentially, only the
    alpha release users will be affected, and they already have to deal
    with lagging docs anyways.

    Andrus

    On May 26, 2009, at 3:11 AM, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
    > The Cayenne project has long had bundled documentation within the
    > release itself. A maven script pulls the docs from Confluence and
    > bundles them up. I've long had a script which 95% works to do this
    > from the final website docs (so they look prettier), but I've never
    > finished that last 5% which is a bit fiddly and ties into bits of
    > maven I don't understand.
    >
    > Given that there are likely to be changes to the way our website is
    > built which will invalidate the existing maven script and mine, I'd
    > like to ask whether we could save ourselves a whole lot of work and
    > not bundle any docs at all with the distribution.
    >
    > Advantages of removing docs from distribution
    > * smaller distribution
    > * less work to rework scripts and for the ongoing task of committing
    > docs to svn
    > * documentation is not frozen in time and fixed for errors or
    > improved clarity (for example users of 3.0M5 aren't seeing the new
    > cache docs Andrus wrote)
    > * nicer to look at
    > * ties in better with external resources (Jira, links to other
    > sites, etc)
    >
    > Advantages of keeping in distribution
    > * snapshot of documentation frozen in time as at that particular
    > release (which is a problem if we rewrite docs for new features and
    > don't keep historic doc pages)
    > * problem for people at 30,000 feet wanting to read docs (that and
    > somewhere in the Sahara desert where there is no internet access)
    >
    >
    > Many projects don't bundle all the docs with the download. Could we
    > create a set of a dozen introductory pages which point you to the
    > javadocs/website/etc?
    >
    > I'm +1 on the idea of removing them before 3.0 final.
    >
    >
    > Ari Maniatis
    >
    >
    >
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