Writing a Frameworks book at Randa

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 3:05 PM, Kevin Funk <kfunk at kde.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday 09 April 2014 02:25:18 Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> > Hello folks, I know that August is months away, but if you want your
> > Frameworks book, now is the time to step forward.
> >
> > Here are some things to think about:
> >
> > Most of this book is already written somewhere. When the words have
> > already been written down, all we need do is gather and arrange them.
> > When you think of such an email, dot story, blog post or have eloquent
> > thoughts in your head, please make a note.
> >
> > If you are on this list, you are an expert. You know what the
> > Frameworks will do for KDE, and you know what they *can* do for
> > others. Our book will present that case. A good book will help grow
> > the Frameworks team; I'm sure of it. And a good book will make your
> > work more widely used. Oh, and you'll be a published author!
> >
> > While in Randa, none of us will be writing full-time. In fact, I hope
> > that *all* of the Frameworks people will stop by the writing room, or
> > log into Booki and review, add, re-arrange, correct, or make the text
> > more graceful.
> >
> > To make this work a few people must volunteer to take on the writing
> > of the book as their most important task at Randa. It will be mine,
> > and our goal is to have a book by the end of the week. We've done it
> > before, and I know we can do it again. This is a valuable work.
> >
> > We need to know the core members of this team, soon. Please step
> > forward, and also add yourself to the Spints page for planning and
> > funding.
> >
> > Valorie
>
> Hey,
>
> I'm wondering if we should rather try spending the time in making our KF5
> apidocs shine. You could spend plenty of time on writing introductory parts
> for the individual modules, writing tutorials and examples, and make sure
> they're easy to reach and grasp for newcomers on apidocs.kde.org. This is
> an
> integral part for the docs on qt-project.org, too. Just have a look at the
> first hit for "qt docs": [1]
>
> There's a "Getting Started" section, with overviews [2] with examples and
> tutorials [3]. That's *exactly* what we need for KF5, too. That's the best
> place to point newcomers to whenever they want to get wet with KF5. But it
> also takes time and people to get to this state.
>
> Personally, from a developer POV, I don't really see the need for a
> separate
> "book". There will always be a discrepancy between the book and the actual
> code (be it completeness, accuracy, its up-to-date-ness), and for
> developers
> it's always an extra burden to make sure to amend the contents of the book
> whenever they change something in source code. It's much more
> straight-forward
> to make sure that at least the apidocs are up-to-date. The apidocs being
> inline in the source code being is an integral part in making sure they're
> amended alongside of source code changes.
>
> Opinions? What do the frameworks devs think about it?
>
> Greets
>
> [1] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/index.html
> [2] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/overviews-main.html
> [3] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qtexamplesandtutorials.html
>
> --
> Kevin Funk
> _______________________________________________
> Kde-frameworks-devel mailing list
> Kde-frameworks-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-frameworks-devel
>

Hi,
I'm unsure what to say. On one hand, people always seem inclined to have
some literature available, especially in the shape of a book. It helps you
go through the technologies when you don't know much what you're doing but
you still want to learn. It offers a linear overview of interesting things
on a related subject, meaning that if things are not interesting, you can
opt to not include them in the book.

On the other hand, documentation is much more future-proof in terms of
having it actively-ish maintained and it will be more useful for the
developers who decide to stay using KF5, since they will know what to look
for.
A proof of this is that even though we have wonderful Qt documentation, we
see new books appearing all the time, and I guess this means they pay off,
at least.

Maybe we should consider the book more as a replacement to the TechBase
[1], if it's even possible to offer it in a proper web shape as well, at
least.

Personally, given that there will be compromises either way, I would say
that who codes (or writes) decides. I'll be happy to give a hand in either
direction.

Aleix

[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Welcome_to_KDE_TechBase
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-frameworks-devel/attachments/20140409/d81e8dc2/attachment.html>