[Lazarus] Lazarus Digest, Vol 99, Issue 32

[Giuliano Colla]

Il 08/04/2016 21:13, Juha Manninen ha scritto:
> Welcome to open source.
> Instead of complaining here and wasting everybody's time, you could
> have improved the documentation yourself and provide a patch.

In principle you're right. However you should take into account some 
other factors.

Frequently users do complain when a problem arises which they are unable 
to solve by themselves.

Asking them to provide a patch doesn't help too much.

On the other hand there is something that could be done to improve the 
situation, and to encourage contributors to help improving the 
documentation.

There's a number of core developers, which set the rules of the game, by 
evaluating contributions, supervising them and accepting or rejecting 
depending on their view of what the product should look like.

It wouldn't be unthinkable that a contribution be evaluated also in 
terms of documentation. Appropriate comments in the source code make 
almost easy to generate a good documentation.

An answer such as: "Your patch is good, it adds a desirable 
functionality, but without proper documentation, nobody will be able to 
take advantage of it. Please add some concise comments on variable and 
procedure usage, and we will be glad to commit it." would do a lot of 
good, IMHO.

Should this become a general rule, the situation might strongly improve 
with time.

Just my 2 cents.

Giuliano