Thank you very much for your help in this,
It is truly one of the top things that will give Open Source even a chance of great success.
Information Intergration and Documentation is all too often Open Source's Achilles heel otherwise.
We can have the best packages, components and units in the world, but if they are not well documented, code is not commented, or obvious in its flow, we're up the creek.
Take for example the truly wonderful TBGRAbitmap and family.
Normally if you ask somewhere for guidance on what to do (there are some quite inflected approaches - say for example - applying filters) you are simply told to look at the excellant LazPaint app source code - I sometimes wonder if some who say that, have ever tried to do that :-)
Now that is a truly advanced piece of coding - but have you ever tried to follow it through in Lazarus IDE? The forms are, for the average Lazarus developer, laid out in a most advanced almost obstrificated fashion - though as I say quite advanced, and you might not even be able to identify and follow things like a simple click procedure through :-) !
So, often for installation, inititalisation, finilisation, and even what might be expected to be straight forward things, you really do need some documentation pointers.
Can't work wothout them.
May be a funding drive for documentation is needed?It's a good idea, but creating a wiki page for each package requires a lot of work.
Ok then, obviously then these issues end up on the Forum here, or at Stack Exchange etc...
"
requires a lot of work" Is there a way then that it can be made more straight forward for the good answers that come forward over time here and elsewhere, to end up as part of such Lazarus Wiki entries?
- Perhaps having mechanisms/reminders built in for making even a basic a Wiki entry pointing back to their Forum Thread, would beceome the next step, for a person once they have the answer(s) they are looking for?
If you Post - take Ownership of the Issue for the Common Good.(No more of threads simply ending with
empty statemetns like:- "its ok now I workled it all out" !!!)
It seems that every component that is a part of an official release, and anything else major that comes along, should have an initial Lazarus wiki entry established, and referenced to as a matter of form, even if that entry is initially quite sparse, or only
mirrors/copies content (to make sure its always available) - and points to the last known maintainer's information or elsewhere.
Then if a new maintainer comes along, the central wiki entry can be updated, but Lazarus Users know where to start looking at first after the CHM - the Lazarus IDE wiki :-)
Then such wiki entries can be augmented as time goes by, as people leaarn / find out things.
Some of that material and content might make it back into the built in CHM help?And maybe the CHM could point to the live Wiki entries?
Better to start off meagre and poor in content, and grow it, than have nothing and no where central identified at all - for valuable contributions eventually to go?
We already have a wealth of valuable information here, but it is spread out and often not found by simple search terms - thats where the Wiki was envisaged to help?
Thanks again,
Paul