June 23, 2004

That'll be 25 summaries, please.


My call for documentation seems not to have impressed too many folks. Thanks to all those who have taken the time to improve Gtk# by providing docs. However, unless something changes dramatically in the next week, we are going to ship Gtk# 1.0 with embarassingly incomplete documentation. There are currently over 5000 instances of the string "To be added" in the Gtk namespace alone, for example.

To those of you who have benefitted from Gtk# so far, I'm now dropping to my knees and begging you to stop writing application code for the next week, and write Gtk# docs instead. Many of you are the "I don't need no steenking docs" types when it comes to Gtk#, since most users at this point are frustrated C API users. However, I'd like you to consider how many times you've accessed the MSDN docs while learning to develop on mono and consider how important it will be for Gtk# to have good docs for our larger post-1.0 audience.

Gtk# is free software. As such, we most likely won't have the benefit of millions of dollars of revenues from it to hire a legion of technical writers to document it for its users. If you have saved time using Gtk# vs. using the C API, I ask that you consider donating back 10% of that time now by writing some docs for the project. You're still 90% ahead, right? If you find a bug or need an enhancement and don't know how to provide a patch for it, consider attaching a patch for 25 of those "To be added" documentation elements along with your bug report.

There are docs available for how to write docs. You can use the monodoc browser to edit the docs. There is a webservice running to accept submissions, or you can use monodoc to apply them to a local tree and submit directly if you have cvs permissions. The more people that contribute documentation, the faster it will get done, and the faster I can get back to fixing bugs, and supporting newer GNOME platforms.

Thanks in advance for your submissions.