Folks, I'd like to contribute to the documentation. I'm long time ago Delphi user and remember the readily available docs with good example code snippets was a real feature. But I'm struggling to understand the document process for Lazarus. So, can anyone clarify a range of things please ?
I've read the Documentation Editor page, built the editor, looked at the xml in source tree and viewed the chm files.
User facing documentation appears in three places, (1) the chm file distributed with the binary, (2) eg
http://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.net/docs/lcl/buttons/tspeedbutton.html and (3)
http://wiki.freepascal.org/TSpeedButton . The first two are derived from the source docs/xml files but not the wiki one. OK
But not always. There is no file containing the stuff that is on SQLdb tab. Eg TSQLQuery is quite well documented on web,
http://wiki.freepascal.org/TSQLQuery, quite differently in the shipped chm file but neither content appears in a source xml file. TSQLTransaction OTOH, has a minimal web presense, OK in the CHM file, also no mention in the source xml.
Question - Is that because TSQL* are FCL things, not LCL ?? Where does FCL stuff come from ?
(Ah you say, at last, a question !)
The footer to the wiki pages (eg
http://wiki.freepascal.org/TSpeedButton) is a useful index to the components, and from there, you can get to the appropriate sourceforge page. But if there is no wiki page, eg TEditButton, its actually pretty hard to find your way. The sourceforge index is a bit clunky, You need to know which unit its in, which tab (LCL) its one. Sigh....
Question - should we have a wiki page for ALL LCL components so that nicely laid out footer can be used ?
And speaking of TEditButton, its (very basic) description is in editbutton.xml in the source. Not in misc.xml. But other components appear in an xml file named for the lazarus tab they appear on. Also Tcalendar, TMainMenu and others.
Question - is there a document / policy / rumour outlining best practice on just where such content should be placed ?
Question - How do the Lord Developers want to receive patches ? One component's text description at a time ? or a batch of updates united because they do or should appear in the same xml file ? (I'd prefer the former but its slower,,,,)
Wow, still reading ? Thats sad ......
David