Documentation

[David Carlson]

On 12/11/2013 9:47 PM, John Ralls wrote: 
On Dec 11, 2013, at 1:29 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote: 
>Um, yeah. My point is that the developer pool would like help with documentation, and most users would be happy to do that, if it matched their mental model on how to edit documents. For most of us (even more advanced types with years of professional editing experience), that model is more based on the word processing editing model rather than the programmer's version control system. Installing Eclipse, and then spending time installing the add-ins, and then on top of all that learning how to use it, is much more complicated than opening a file in a Word processor, turning on "Track Changes," typing in your replacement text and sending it in for review. As wonderful as version control systems might be (and I am sure they really are), there is (for me at least) one hell of a learning curve--one that precludes my being much more than a commenter on Bugzilla bugs for documentation. David P.S.: Over the years, I have installed Eclipse at different times on
 different platforms in the (clearly misguided) hope that I might learn how it works. Thus far, it has eluded my abilities to understand. Similarly, I earlier today followed John's instructions elsewhere on this thread, and installed TortoiseGit and Git for Windows, but was unable to find an entry point to editing the GnuCash documents that made any sense to me. 
>Yup, got that. So having cloned the gnucash-docs repo with TortoiseGit, you have the baseline files on your computer. The next step is to open either gnucash-guide.xml or gnucash-help.xml in such a way that you can edit it without having the XML bother you too much. That's actually the hard part. You could use PanDoc to create a M$Word or OpenOffice document and make your edits, but I haven't yet seen a good way to then put it back into DocBook format to make a commit with.  I'm leaning towards the wiki solution at the moment. Regards,
John Ralls _______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel at gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel 
Isn't there is a possibility that more than one person could edit a wiki
page simultaneously?  If so, I suspect that they could step on each
others changes and the wiki may not be robust enough to sort that out. A long time ago I was a programmer for machines that were operated with
programmable controllers.  We did not have version control beyond
limiting one programmer to work on a machine's code at a time and
depending on his personal scheme of version control to not step on his
own edits.  That did not always work.  Eventually some better solutions
came along in that field that theoretically resembled SVN, but they were
cumbersome and expensive.  Even today they are not often used. My point is that you were using SVN and now are using git for good
reason and I think it would be a mistake to compromise that.  Using the wiki as a buffer might protect the documents but it could get
out of control.  If there is any other way... David C