[Lazarus] help writing help [was: Re: Re: Suggestion for TRadioGroup documentation]

Lukasz Sokol el.es.cr at gmail.com
Mon Apr 11 12:09:52 CEST 2016


Hi Jürgen,

On 09/04/16 13:38, Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 2016-04-09 um 13:26 schrieb Michael Thompson:
>> What?  How's that going to work?  I prefer my open source projects
>> alive and kicking :-( I'm not interested in theoretical "wouldn't
>> it be nice".  I agree that it would be nice if we have
>> documentation, and I like putting a plan in place to forward this.
>> But the proposal above is insane.
> 
> It highly depends:
> 
> If you think that open source projects are *exclusivley* for those
> people who contribute on it and who are so involved that they don't
> need any documentation because they already know everything and have
> the time to keep track on all changes then, yes, there is no need for
> documentation.
> 
Hmm, try putting out proposal like this on lkml...

On a more serious note:

Unless what you're doing with Open Source/Free Software is fairly trivial,
and a general-purpose solution exists that fits your needs, 
then you don't really need to contribute to anything, 
because the problem has already been solved.
You can use binary stable releases and be the happy receiver at the end of the chain.
You can settle on just configuring it, writing a script or two in $favorite_scripting_language sometimes, etc.

A programmer/developer of anything based on Open Source solutions, isn't ANYTHING of the above, IMO.


> But if you want to attract a wider audience of people who just use it
> then documentation is essential. Otherwise you have to answer the
> same questions here over and over again (or ignore them and let
> people use other, better documented tools for programming).
> 

People involved, whether only as users, or as contributors, in
projects based on c-like languages of similar size to FPC/Lazarus, 
they ALL DO THAT. Go read some lkml or kernel-newbies for examples
how a MUCH LARGER community handles this...
(Luckily FPC and Lazarus aren't so big that a fpc/lazarus -newbies mailing list would be needed...)

Coders choose to code and do minimal documentation (e.g. comments),
others choose to document what the coders wrote. That creates movement
and discussion, helps coders correct themselves if need be, keeps the project alive.
But it needs input and contribution.

And (Object) Pascal is infinitely MORE readable than any c-like lang.
We should be able to do the same so much easier, just by looking at code.


That's facts, as I see them.

-L.





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