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From: | Matt Gushee |
Subject: | Re: [Chicken-users] The Documentation Problem |
Date: | Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:48:24 -0600 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090213) |
Sven Hartrumpf wrote:
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:25:28 -0600, matt wrote:And I conceived of a project that might make it easier to access all the various docs. I call it SUDS (Scheme Unified Documentation Server). Basically, there would be a lightweight Web server (maybe Spiffy-based?) that could be deployed either on the public internet or on your own computer. It would have a database of all the reference docs for a particular system ... so for Chicken, the DB would include R5RS, all supported SRFIs, the Chicken manual, and docs for all the eggs.There are several such projects with a solid infrastructure - but they sometimes lack user support. For example, please have a look at (and consider contributing to): SchemeCrossReference http://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/schemexref.cgi
Yes, I've seen this, and I think it's a worthy project, and I might well contribute to it, once I have enough expertise to do so. However, the focus is not quite the same. The central point I want to address is:
* As an IMPLEMENTATION-X user, how can I gain a comprehensive view of IMPLEMENTATION-X?More concretely, I would like to have a single point of access--and a single method of access--to *all* the key concepts and *all* the reference documentation for the *system I am using*. Surely there are many people who would benefit from such a thing. It may not be an absolute need, but IMHO it is much more than a convenience. In fact, I have a strong feeling that the difficulty of finding information is one of the major reasons Scheme has not been more widely adopted.
So what can be done? It is obviously impractical to maintain a single, comprehensive documentation package. But it might be feasible to create an aggregator that gives you the single point of access to all the docs you need, which is the idea of SUDS. I do think, as I stated in my original post, that it is crucial to be able to automatically populate the database. Otherwise it's very unlikely that the index would ever be complete and up-to-date.
With all that said, I would be delighted to find that something like this already exists. Sven, you mentioned "several such projects." Can you point me to some others?
-- Matt Gushee : Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ : : RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language : matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :
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