[Lazarus] Lazarus Digest, Vol 99, Issue 32

Giuliano Colla giuliano.colla at fastwebnet.it
Sat Apr 9 17:00:17 CEST 2016


Il 09/04/2016 16:22, Juha Manninen ha scritto:
> On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 5:07 PM, Giuliano Colla
> <giuliano.colla at fastwebnet.it> wrote:
>> Because without a minimal amount of documentation all this valuable work
>> risks to be useless, because:
>> - nobody except a few core developers know of its existence
>> - nobody except the developer itself knows how to use it
> LCL is documented more or less.
> I guess you mean the IDE internals are not documented. It is true,
> their documentaion has low priority compared to public libs.
> I also would love to see high level diagrams and other docs about the
> IDE. Like always, somebody must do it.
> Maybe you ... :)

My comment was about the portions of your or other's valuable work (IT 
IS VALUABLE, you can say it loudly) which aren't documented, or are 
poorly documented. (the *less* sections of the *more or less*)
And to stress to developers (myself included, I'm as documentation lazy 
as anybody else around here, maybe more..) the importance of letting 
other people understand exactly what it's been done, so that it is 
widely used, giving the only possible reward to Open Source developers: 
their work is not just an idle exercise, but it is actually used.

There is a specific moment in the development cycle when a developer can 
find the time to write some documentation: it is between the submitting 
of his patch/implementation/enhancement/whatever, and the testing from 
others. In this stage it would be unwise to change something before 
receiving some feedback, and the developer has still a fresh memory of 
what he's done. If he is encouraged to do it, chances are good that he 
will comply. And chances are also good that while browsing what he's 
just done, he will spot and fix a couple of bugs....

Giuliano







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