On 21-04 09:09, Martin Hoffmann wrote:
Juha Heinanen wrote:
Klaus Darilion writes:
I prefer README as authoritative source - every feature commit should also add a feature descrption (e.g. do not write long commit messages but write the text into the README and then copy paste it into the commit message)
i agree and also, there should be a common format for readme file source files. if i look at modules/tm, it contains:
jh@taimen:/usr/src/orig/sip-router$ ls modules/tm/doc api.xml functions.xml Makefile params.xml tm.xml
and if i look at a k derived module, it has:
jh@taimen:/usr/src/orig/sip-router$ ls modules/auth_radius/doc auth_radius_admin.xml auth_radius.xml
Before sip-router started, I started an effort for SER to have all module documentation standardized into a manual page based on docbook sources.[0] The result is certainly optimal, for a user on a *nix system, doing "man tm" should be natural.
The source format is dubious, though. I eventually ended up with docbook since it is a standard of sorts and there are tools to make manpages out of the sources (although they need some tweaking). However, editing is as painful as it gets. For documentation, painful editing usually means it is not being done. So, if someone has a better suggestion for the source format, they are most welcome. Some lightweight markup like RST is probably a good idea, but then someone needs to write a RST-to-docbook converter (shouldn't be that hard) and we need some formating rules (not very hard either, pretty much everyone knows how manpages look).
I certainly agree with the idea that all new stuff should be documented, but I wonder whether we should revisit the system we write documentation in? I am personaly fine with docbook.
But if our goal is to produce plain text READMEs, wouldn't it make more sense to adopt something simpler, for example the dokuwiki format? It is easily readable as plain-text and we can edit it in the wiki and synchornize with READMEs in the repository.
It's just an idea...
Jan.