[CMake] Documentation strategy

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-06-20 10:56-0400 Brandon Van Every wrote:

> On 6/20/07, Philippe Fremy <phil at freehackers.org> wrote:
>> 
>> All in all, CMake is a good and powerful tool, but I find that the
>> documentation is lacking behind. More structure, more usage example,
>> more common cases would in my opinion really help the user experience.
>
> Well, you can buy the "Mastering CMake" book.

However, that is terribly out of date and paper so I have never been tempted
to buy it. However, if a new edition of that book was made available in an
open electronic format, I would be interested in using it and helping out
with feedback if I discovered any problems with it. I have no interest in
paper books any more, or closed electronic formats, but I do like to support
electronic formats where you are free to do anything you like with them
including copying to your friends to help popularize CMake. In the last few
months, I have finally got off the dime and started using SVN for everything
rather than continuing to limp along with CVS, and the subversion book
(freely downloadable from http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ in a number of
editions and translations) is a huge lifesaver, and I think it is one of the
fundamental reasons why subversion is finally overcoming CVS's
"first-to-market" advantage.  The analogy between subversion and CVS on the
one hand, and CMake and autottools on the other is pretty good in the sense
that you have outstanding new software that replaces the old, yet there is
still a huge pool of people using the old software because of that old
software's "first-to-market" advantage.  In sum, I think CMake could benefit
a lot by following the model about how subversion is doing its
documentation.  (Note, the subversion book also comes in paper formats 
through O'Reilly if you want to pay for those.)

>
> There's this strategic problem that modifying the CMake docs and
> submitting patches for them is cumbersome.  The auto-doc structure is
> fine for documenting individual functions, but it provides no
> structure at all for general concepts encompassing many functions, or
> CMake operative principles in general.  I haven't looked into whether
> there's a good answer for this, although at some point I may.  It's a
> basic infrastructure problem.

Excellent point.

>
> I'm not sure wikis are the answer either.  I do add things to the
> wiki, but I don't think wikis really cause a lot of people to make
> significant doc contributions.  Then you run into the problem of "how
> do we ship wiki docs?"  One answer is you don't, you force the user to
> access the internet and use the - typically very limited - wiki format
> for their lookup needs.  What people really want is docs that work
> well with their chosen IDE.  In the Chicken Scheme community we've got
> some people working on wiki --> TexInfo conversion, because they are
> so irritated with all the docs being on a wiki.
>
> It seems like a really basic infrastructure common to a lot of open
> source projects.  Reminds me of the motive for distributed rather than
> centralized version control systems, like Darcs and Mercurial.  I
> haven't looked around to see if anyone has come up with a better open
> source doc paradigm.
>

Excellent points. I think of wikis as rough drafts of documentation so a
wiki to "real" documentation language (TexInfo, docbook, or whatever)
converter is a great idea. I was interested enough to do a google search for
(wiki docbook conversion), and I particularly liked one suggestion I found
which was to make software to convert wiki information into the APT (almost
plain text) format, and then from that format you can convert into anything
you like (see http://www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html).  I bet somebody has
already made a rough Wiki to APT converter (which is all you would need),
but I have not found it yet.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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