Gert Driesen wrote:
Rutger Dijkstra wrote:
[snip]
One can, of course, distribute the relevant documentation by making it available online; this is a respectable thing to do. However, that would mean that you have to ensure the continued availability of the documentation of older versions of NAnt: people my still be relying on it.
I am working on this, and I've already done this for the user manual. Doing the same for the SDK will not take much effort.
This would require a far better than current organization of the continued availability of previous distributions.
Same here : I'm already looking into this, and have posted a message on this topic to the users mailing list (I think, might have been developers mailing list).
The easiest way to ensure that users of version X also have access to the documentation of version X is, obviously, to package the docs in the distribution.
Sure, but I'll make the docs available online (too) anyway ...
cheers, Rutger
PS. where does the idea of removing the SDK from the binary distributions actually come from? Would it serve any purpose?
A smaller download is the major reason.
I'd suggest that the ideal (?) solution would be to cater to pretty much everyone, if possible. To use the Java Development Kit as an example (which is probably inflamatory in a .Net forum, but just bear with the example :-), the JDK and the JDK documentation are separate downloads... in addition, the documentation is available online for all supported versions of the JDK. That way, you can choose how much you want to download - if you're just doing a small proof-of-concept, you can download the JDK and use the online help. If you move offline, or start on a larger or more in-depth project, you can download the documentation for the version of the JDK you downloaded, even if there has been a release in the meantime.
Gert, with your suggested changes to the NAnt and NAnt-contrib website structures, it sounds as if you should be able to support exactly this... at least until you run out of web space, at which point you might have to end-of-life some older nightlies ;-)
For these reasons, I'd support taking the SDK documentation out of the binary distribution, but also to make the documentation available as a separate download as well as online, if this is feasible.
The increased size of the distribution is not really a problem for the officicial releases, but uploading the nightly builds takes about 30 minutes (during which my dev pc is not usable, as scp makes my pc unresponsive). Surely this cannot be a reason to stop including SDK docs in official releases ...
No, but you can only take so much inconvenience...
PPS. I would't mind contributing to the documentation effort, but, not having written the software, my documentation could only be my best guess. It might be better if the documentation is written by the people that actually know.
Rutger, this is a common view, but is not always accurate. If you try to use a task and come up against some issue, and the documentation doesn't cover the issue properly so you spend half an hour (or hours!) working through the issue, then writing down what you learned and sending it back, even just to the list, can contribute... often in ways that the person who wrote the code involved may not have thought about.
Having said that, I realise that having spent unexpected time dealing with an issue usually means that you're behind schedule and don't have time to draft and send the letter... but everyone appreciates it when you do :-) (except your boss...)
Regards,
-- Troy
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