Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

[proposal] Update and automate documentation #55

Open
kalinon opened this issue May 27, 2020 · 8 comments
Open

[proposal] Update and automate documentation #55

kalinon opened this issue May 27, 2020 · 8 comments

Comments

@kalinon
Copy link
Contributor

kalinon commented May 27, 2020

What the title says. There is a lot of great documentation all in the one README file. perhaps we can break it up into smaller sections and use the wiki?

@Papierkorb
Copy link
Owner

Papierkorb commented May 27, 2020

Back then, I chose the README as main documentation hub (Along the TEMPLATE.yml) for four reasons:

  1. It's easily Ctrl+F'able, or in less keyboard-terms, easily discoverable through means everyone knows
  2. It's part of every checkout and will always reflect the state your checkout is in
  3. It's harder to get out of date as developers simply see it more often. A wiki page is quickly forgotten. (Yet to find a non-dusty Github Wiki page myself)
  4. The user is guaranteed to have a copy of it available

A source of inspiration was the README of https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra, which may be longer than the bible (Haven't checked). Still, using Ctrl+F I can quickly find what I was looking for, both online and offline. Has been a few years so don't remember anymore, but I once saw a talk on YouTube where the talker explicitly used Sinatra as example.

This is not to dissuade anyone of proposing against these points, just what my reasons were back then.

@kalinon
Copy link
Contributor Author

kalinon commented May 27, 2020

@Papierkorb all good reasons! Perhaps a table of contents at the top? Its great documentation so wanted to make sure its easily accessible and we can identify any places that need updating easily as well.

@Papierkorb
Copy link
Owner

Ah sure, a TOC would be splendid

@docelic
Copy link
Collaborator

docelic commented May 27, 2020

Added ToC to the README using a script from "github-markdown-toc" repository.

@docelic
Copy link
Collaborator

docelic commented May 27, 2020

For TEMPLATE.yml, to suit everyone's preferences it looks like we'd need three versions of it:

  1. Just the documentation, extracted into some standard documentation format (e.g. Markdown)
  2. TEMPLATE.yml, unchanged, as it is currently
  3. TEMPLATE.yml, containing only example config (no documentation, or at least not longer that 1-2 lines per section)

And again/also with the ToC added to the first one (or two) items from the list.

I am going to see how easy/convenient it would be to write a script that produces all this from ideally a single format (maybe from the current TEMPLATE.yml or similar).

(@kalinon if you had a preference/intention to work on this yourself, let me know of course.)

@kalinon kalinon changed the title [proposal] Break up README into the git wiki [proposal] Update and automate documentation May 27, 2020
@kalinon
Copy link
Contributor Author

kalinon commented May 27, 2020

I changed the title to more reflect what we are thinking. @docelic you are good, it was more of a thought i had. I will use github-markdown-toc for some of my other projects tho!

@docelic
Copy link
Collaborator

docelic commented May 28, 2020

I've tried converting the documentation from TEMPLATE.yml into Markdown. The results are good and I plan to add this as file CONFIGURATION.md.

An example can be seen here:
https://github.com/docelic/bindgen/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md

At least for now I've given up on trying to automate this as I think these things will rarely change, and "normal", elaborate documentation is a necessity for any project.

(We can still keep all the comments in TEMPLATE.yml of course; these ideas are not in conflict.)

@kalinon
Copy link
Contributor Author

kalinon commented May 29, 2020 via email

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants