docs: wine-devel [0/16]

Dimitrie O. Paun dpaun at rogers.com
Sun Sep 21 11:43:06 CDT 2003


Hi folks,

I've been doing some work on the Wine Developer's Guide. It's in
better shape now, but I'd still rate it at 2.5 stars. It still
needs some work until it's production quality, but the end is in
sight. In fact, if Lionel can look at the OpenGL section (lots
of things changed in there lately), and Eric at the Multimedia
section (lots of things out of date), we'd be so much closer.

Instead of sending all the updates as one big patch, I've tried
to split them up, for all the known reasons. But before I start
sending patches, I have a few comments about this documentation
business.

First, we have to resist the temptation to add a lot of
redundant information. Like what is cvs, how it functions, etc.
There are better resources available on the web, and we simply
don't have the manpower to maintain, translate, etc. all this
information. Having a lot of documentation may give us a warm
and fuzzy feeling, but in fact it just shows how we have failed
to make Wine transparent, and/or we haven't refined the docs. 
Nobody likes to read documentation, so let's keep it short,
sweet, and interesting.

Second, we have to avoid at all cost including information that
can change often. We get an update for these docs only once every
few years, and having obsolete information in there is way worse
than having no information at all. There are better places to
put such info: man pages, web pages (WineHQ), etc. Having it
duplicated somewhere in the depths of these manuals serves no 
purpose then to create more (and useless) work for us.

Third, we have to try to make these things look as books, and
less likely a motley collection of files, interlaced with
TODOs/FIXMEs/etc.

-- 
Dimi.




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