On Wednesday, 16 December 2015 at 15:19:12 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe
wrote:
On Wednesday, 16 December 2015 at 13:49:22 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
One still most likely need to build the site, which is kind
of a pain to
do.
Building the site mimicks building dmd, druntime, and phobos.
It's an invocation of make. What are the difficulties? --
Andrei
Building dmd, druntime, and phobos is a big pain in the butt
too.
To check a change to the documentation right now, you first
need to download and build git dmd (which depends on an
existing dmd). Then druntime and phobos with it. Only then are
you in a position to build the website since it depends on
running the compiler over phobos which often depends on
bleeding edge dmd.
Maybe that's easy if you're already running bleeding edge
everything, but it is an awful lot of process when you just
want to eyeball a quick visual change.
(and there's all the stuff about git branches being out of sync
for me too because I'm a more casual contributor)
When I make doc changes, I tend to just do it blind on the
website and hope it works because it isn't worth spending half
an hour setting up just to paste in an example or something.
...and then the auto-tester is awfully whiny so the pull
request needs more adjustment and I'm left dropping f-bombs and
vowing to never try contributing to upstream D again.
Indeed the effort required to make a simple change to the website
is unacceptable.
Independent from the ddoc discussion, this could be solved with a
server showing the code of a given page of the site, allowing
editing and showing the resulting modification.
