On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 11:43 +0200, Frank Peters wrote: > Gerry, > > G. Roderick Singleton wrote: > > There seems to be some problems with the current DevGuide that are > > political and proprietary in nature. Sun produces this guide. While this > > can you please elaborate? What kind of problems?
Are you sure you want to know? I do not think the reasons need be discussed on this list. They have been discussed on another list and the result is this request to start preparing an OpenOffice.org Dev Guide. > > > guide has a five year head start, it seems to me that we might be able > > to create an acceptable guide and avoid the nonsense. > > What do you mean by "nonsense"? Off list if you want details. > > > Let's have some ideas. If there are any takers, I can set up a task and > > a master document with which to start. > > Let me emphasize that producing a Developer's Guide from scratch > is far from being an easy task. The original dev guide (now > 1,000+ pages) was created by three full time authors over a period > of several months. Without close relationship to the developers > this is a hard thing to do. Have I said it would be easy? No. What I ask is that the idea be examined. Your comments are part of that evaluation process. > > As mentioned in my previous replies (to later postings) we > will open source the dev guide in the mid future but it still > needs a considerable amount of maintenance work. So there will > be loads of opportunities to work on developer docs. > Well this would be good. If the doc project goes ahead and gets some decent words down. We could examine merging at that point or whatever. > Apart from that, we should start discussing a strategy around > this type of docs instead of just starting off. Even with a > dev guide there are still huge gaps in the dev doc space that > should be identified and closed: > > - we have the in-depth dev guide that is very detailed > and highly technical for the geeks among us. > - we also have the (StarOffice) BASIC guide as an entry level doc We are working on addressing this. > - there is Andrew Pitonyak's excellent macro document I agree it is excellent. However it is Andrew's and, at this point, we at the doc project have not approached him about formalizing it in the documentation set. We have chosen, rather, to host it. > - cross references VBA<->BASIC on docs.oo.o In the works. > - online help content for BASIC runtime functions > - and the hacker's wiki > We can have a look at these. > This looks sort of unsorted to me. If we could work out a plan > and identify what we would need to complement the existing > docs that would be great. Possible tasks in this area would > encompass > > - split up the dev guide to make it less monolithic You mean like a master doc and chapters? Excellent idea. I used the monolithic approach with the 1.1.x guide and found it unsatisfactory. The 2.x guide is master and chapters. > - merge BASIC guide and macro information Maybe useful, maybe not. Creating a document that addresses only OOoBASIC macros might not be the best approach. However, that considered, a macro handbook that goes beyond our existing HOW-TOs would be a definite asset. > - create a OOo macro cookbook Not sure about this one. On the surface, a good idea but I think that the limited target audience is well served by the wiki and lists. > - create docs for creating OOo extensions > Now this might be interesting. We, as a project, have not visited teh extensions/addon question for awhile. > I confess that some of the tasks depend on Sun open sourcing the > guides and I apologize for the delays but I can assure you that > we're working on this. > So I was told. Along with a suggestion that we should have a look at creating our own. -- G. Roderick Singleton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenOffice.org
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