[Xerte] Developer documentation

Julian Tenney Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk
Thu May 14 14:29:18 BST 2009


Toolkits oughtn't to need a vast manual. In designing it, we have sought
to make it simple and easy to use for people who don't read manuals even
if there were one. We are looking at creating a number of documents for
Toolkits users through the Xpert project: Alistair has a list, and they
will all go on the wiki. Anyone can contribute others.

Xerte has about 700 pages of documentation in the help file and a number
of other documents are around.

Attaining the sort of insight a developer might need to start doing
things like adding a text fomatting bar to the toolkits wizard or
gaining an overview of how toolkits works is, right now, probably best
done by asking friendly and postive questions on this list, which are
likely to draw lengthy and insightful replies.

J

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Fred Riley
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:20 PM
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: RE: [Xerte] Developer documentation

> Is anyone still reading? Spot quiz time? What is the air 
> speed velocity of a swallow?

Would that be a laden or unladen swallow? :o)

Thanks for the long post, Pat, which is longest I've ever seen you by at
least an order of magnitude ;-). 

> As a developer, I could go write the manuals, but in terms of 
> sheer pragmatism, do people think the time spent on that 
> would be commensurate with the resources returned?

In my experience as a user of Open Source software, the user
documentation is usually a collective effort, written by users who've
become familiar with the software. Developer documentation is often
sparse or non-existent, though again that's not surprising or
blameworthy.

Cheers

Fred
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