-----Original Message----- From: Alexandre Prokoudine [mailto:alexandre.prokoudine@...400...] Sent: vrijdag 2 januari 2009 3:21 To: Inkscape Devel List Subject: [Inkscape-devel] intro for developers
Hi,
Recently a person reported to out bug tracker that the website doesn't provide good introduction information for new developers.
So I've just taken a look at http://inkscape.org/doc/devdocs.php and I have several questions:
- Do you find this information overall sufficient?
- Last changes to http://inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/DeveloperManual
date back to February 2007. Would anyone mind having a look and saying whether something needs changes? (btw, our wiki outputs errors again) 3. Does the flowchart at http://inkscape.org/doc/devdocs.php really reflect current state of source code? 4. Same question about class hierarchy image.
It's nice that you care about the report Alex. But I am somewhat pessimistic about improvements to the documentation.
I think the single most important documentation for a floss project is how to get it built from scratch. And it must be easy to build, so the documentation is short and understandable. I ran away in desperation trying to build OpenOffice; Inkscape is very easy on windows luckily. Only thing left to do is remove the old and obsolete documentation and point to the correct wiki page. And then: get the people in our jabber or IRC channel, there's almost always people around to help with questions!
All the class diagrams, code organization, etc, I think it is hardly ever used or read. It is just too much to try and read about how a big program like Inkscape works, without having looked at the code for a long time. And, once you know how a certain piece works, the documentation on the website has become almost useless, so motivation is lacking to document it. Sifting through code is much more precise and quicker. I use notepad++'s find-in-all-files certainly once every minute during development. I usually understand written code very quickly, so maybe it doesn't work as well for people that are newer to the language.
In any case, I know little of Inkscape, and am still able to contribute. Some parts I know well, some parts I don't know anything about. It's not needed to know all :-), certainly not for all the "low hanging fruit" that we have.
To new devs: join our chat channel!
Cheers, Johan