On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 08:18:18PM +0000, Jens Vagelpohl wrote: > I would say the only benefit was the unification of docs for Zope and > installed third party products in one place,
Good point! > and its "context- > sensitivity" for documenting screens in the ZMI when you're on them > by clicking the link. I've always tried to be good about it, and most > of my software has relatively up-to-date HelpSys documentation. Me too. > On the other hand I believe most product authors don't use HelpSys > documentation, and the Zope-provided pieces are way less current and > informative than the Zope book (2.7 version). Yes. I think we as a community have a general documentation maintenance problem. It is something that neither ZC nor the community at large has placed sufficient value on - understandably! Free docs don't pay anybody's bills. There needs to be a driving force here stronger than "it would be nice to have better docs", or there never will be. Maybe once the Zope Foundation is up and running, I will propose that the Foundation play a role. Maybe fundraising and earmarking funds for doc work would help. (... oh crap, I forgot about the foundation chat today. Probably would have been OT at this stage anyway.) > IMHO it would be nice if the HelpSys could be changed so that it > still provides those Help! links, but the product author can simply > assign a URL to them to point to a place where they copied and pasted > their docs into a website. That's not too much of an imposition on > product authors I think. I think that would work. If so, the question then becomes: timetable and plan for deprecating HelpSys. I don't think we can simply rip out registerHelp() in 2.10 unless we have deprecation warnings in 2.9; and a useful deprecation warning requires something in place we can advise people to do instead. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com _______________________________________________ Zope-Dev maillist - Zope-Dev@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )
