ryaxnb
March 23rd, 2009, 05:32 PM
Look, Ubuntu needs developer documentation. Having the code is not good enough. It is critical for success, just like windows and dos, that canonical do a developer doc project. I'm sorry, but the #1 reason for Windows and Apple's success with developers is despite all the little oddities that made developing for Windows/Mac OS a pain, especially Windows 9x, they were all documented in the MSDN. You could easily find out the way to get past just about anything.
Documentation is important, read richard m. stallman's essay. One thing i admire about stallman is his dedication to documentation.
Ubuntu just needs a good developer library, kind of a mix between a actually decent wiki and the msdn library. My idea would be staff-written on the main apis and functions and ideas, with references and documents in kind of a extensively searchable wiki library. Searchability is the key. It would be like a wiki msdn. The code is not good enough here, you need actual documentation to win over developers. MSDN is the reason Microsoft got so many developers and thus users on board, why not ubuntu. And the project doesn't have to be ubuntu-exclusive, but it should be ubuntu-centric. It is important to develop one of these developer wikis because users almost never use documentation but developers do.
Documentation is important, read richard m. stallman's essay. One thing i admire about stallman is his dedication to documentation.
Ubuntu just needs a good developer library, kind of a mix between a actually decent wiki and the msdn library. My idea would be staff-written on the main apis and functions and ideas, with references and documents in kind of a extensively searchable wiki library. Searchability is the key. It would be like a wiki msdn. The code is not good enough here, you need actual documentation to win over developers. MSDN is the reason Microsoft got so many developers and thus users on board, why not ubuntu. And the project doesn't have to be ubuntu-exclusive, but it should be ubuntu-centric. It is important to develop one of these developer wikis because users almost never use documentation but developers do.