Documentation wiki

[Michael T]

Hello Jeremy,

The documentation I needed has ranged from how to handle the clipboard from 
applications (yes, most of the stuff is documented in the ICCCM and Xt docs, 
but they leave a number of gaps, like how modern applications treat the 
clipboard and the type conversions which take place in XLib between the 
server and a 64bit client) to how to add randr 1.2 support to a driver, with 
many other things on the way.

I was talking about the documentation under www.x.org/wiki, which is still 
rather minimal, even though particularly Keith Packard has written lots of 
relevent stuff over the years.  Might some of that not be able to go in 
there?  The XFree86 docs on how to write a driver for the X server would 
also be nice to have in a wiki, so that anyone interested could update them 
a little at a time, providing of course the original authors agreed.

What else?  There are so many bits of useful documentation, ranging from the 
ICCCM to the XLib programmers manual to the Xt documentation to hundreds of 
short docs on X11 extensions, all scattered about the place.  I find it a 
big problem that there is no central repository for all that stuff.  Of 
course, it is probably not reasonable to put the ICCCM into a wiki to be 
updated by anyone interested...

And yes, while I don't have time to write large pieces of documentation, I 
could quite see myself updating things in a wiki if I see that they are out 
of date or incomplete, and if I have better information at hand.

Regards,

Michael

>From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>
>To: Michael T <raselmsh at hotmail.com>
>CC: xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
>Subject: Re: Documentation wiki
>Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2007 16:18:06 -0500 (CDT)
>
>On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Michael T wrote:
>
> > Whenever I want to do something X related - on the driver side or the
> > application side - I always find that I need a long time to find all the
> > documentation needed for the task, and that that documentation often has
> > gaps or is somewhat dated.  I wanted to suggest that you expand the
> > documentation section of your wiki somewhat - on the one hand, adding in 
>as
> > much available documentation as possible that the authors are willing to
> > licence appropriately for a wiki, and on the other hand, perhaps more
> > importantly, encouraging users of the documentation to extend and update 
>it
> > themselves.  This might do a lot to help people developing for X and 
>X.Org,
> > and even ultimately help you get more code contribution.
>
>What documentation specifically did you need?
>
>Are you available to help writing the documentation?
>
>I am interested in helping with this. Does anyone know if your wiki can be
>maintained via cvs/svn/git/other? And can I check out the wiki source
>(source of individual webpages with wiki markup) without manually going to
>each webpage and choosing edit and then copy-and-paste?
>
>   Jeremy C. Reed

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