[SR-Dev] what to do if function names differ?

[Martin Hoffmann]

Jan Janak wrote:
> On 21-04 10:41, Martin Hoffmann wrote:
> > Juha Heinanen wrote:
> > > Daniel-Constantin Mierla writes:
> > > 
> > >  > This is open source 
> > >  > and as soon as we get community involved, the project evolves much 
> > >  > better. 
> > > 
> > > community is not able to write docs for common modules, e.g., tm.
> > 
> > Why not? Everyone who can read code can write documentation. Granted, tm
> > is tricky, but the developers can read over it and point out mistakes.
> 
> You actually have to understand the code to be able to document it
> properly.

I am quite aware of that. But the amount of familiarity with the code
necessary to write useful documentation differs. Modules like xlog or
acc are easy and even someone new to SER code can extract the necessary
information. tm is the other extreme. Figuring out what the module will
do with ACKs and CANCELs is a task for several hours.

But interstingly enough, this latter point also shows that documentation
written by developers is necessarily good either. Neither K nor SER
document the very subtle and occassionally unexpected behaviour.

> Sure, you can always hire a technical writer who will produce
> boilerplate like documentation, but I doubt that such documentation will be of
> much use.
 
The main skill of a good technical writer is to ask the right questions.
Sure, they are a very rare breed, but if you happen to run across one,
you will afterwards understand your own code better.

Regards,
Martin