[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Documentation

Rafael J. Wysocki rjw at rjwysocki.net
Tue Aug 4 00:52:39 UTC 2015


On Monday, August 03, 2015 08:33:11 AM Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Aug 2015 15:35:36 +0200
> "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw at rjwysocki.net> wrote:
> 
> > > While I don't discourage it, I am not a fan of automated documentation.
> > > As you and mtk would know, writing high quality, informative, systems
> > > software documentation is an involved process. And it should be, imo.
> > > Same goes for describing APIs and algorithms in code comments. Sure,
> > > automation has its pros, particularly keeping docs up to date; yet this
> > > does not outweigh a well crafted document, which involves actual though.  
> > 
> > "thought" I guess?
> > 
> > I have to say I agree here.
> 
> Surely nobody thinks I was saying that the documentation-writing process
> can be automated! :)  But we go to some lengths now to document our APIs
> in the code; I don't think we would want to break that.

No, I wouldn't at least.

> > Not to mention the fact that if you are browsing the kernel tree via a web
> > frontend or LXR, for example, plain text docs are really good to have.
> 
> The nice thing about formats like Markdown or ReST is that they *are*
> plain text for all practical purposes.  Much better than DocBook in that
> regard.

I must admit I'm not really familiar with any of these, but at least Markdown
looks promising from a quick glance.

Thanks,
Rafael



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