Author Topic: Poor Documentation  (Read 5273 times)

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Offline Cool Javelin

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Poor Documentation
« on: 09 06 2014, 17:26:13 »
OK, Mirnada NG has been out for some time now,  :) and I understand it is a freeware program supported by a volunteer community, but, really, is there no standard and rating system for documentation?  :-\

Each of the plugin's has an associated wiki page, and that is GREAT!!   :THUMBS UP: ,  however, 90% of those are only single line descriptions telling briefly what the plugin does. :-[

For example, the command line .dll plugin page states "This plugin lets you control Miranda from the command line. " I can probably glean that from the plugin name.

Come-on, are programmers these days really so lazy they can't include at least at usage description? >:(

The Wiki page should have the FULL documentation of how to use the plugin, what is expected from the user, what options may or may not be available, etc.

Mark.

 

Offline Robyer

Odp: Poor Documentation
« Reply #1 on: 09 06 2014, 17:49:56 »
Hi Mark,
you must understand that NG team is only a small group of people and it's not possible for us to recreate full documentation for >100 plugins. Also we didn't created these plugins, we only adopted them from their IM source codes. It's not about laziness. If developers would write this documentation from scratch, we will have zero fixes, features, etc.  for a long time.

Every help is welcome, so if you want to improve our wiki pages, we'll give you edit rights. Then you just need to search for documentation of IM version of that plugin and copy/rewrite it to our wiki. I just searched for that command line plugin for you: http://addons.miranda-im.org/details.php?action=viewfile&id=3477  |  http://forums.miranda-im.org/showthread.php?13585-Command-Line-(CmdLine)-plugin
I was developing mainly Facebook, Omegle, Steam, Dummy and MobileState plugins. Now I'm retired. Goodbye, everyone. ~ You can still find me on Facebook.
 

Offline White-Tiger

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Re: Poor Documentation
« Reply #2 on: 09 06 2014, 18:18:54 »
[...]
Come-on, are programmers these days really so lazy they can't include at least at usage description? >:(

The Wiki page should have the FULL documentation of how to use the plugin, what is expected from the user, what options may or may not be available, etc.

Mark.
Some are, some are not :P Generally I agree that the Wiki pages are mostly useless... one reason might be that not everyone is allowed to improve them for what ever reason.. (not the way a Wiki is supposed to work btw.) On the other side we could have taken the "original" Miranda IM description from their Addon site to at least provide a little bit more information...

What do you personally say about this Wiki page? http://wiki.miranda-ng.org/index.php?title=Plugin:SendSS
Since I'm kind of maintaining SendSS now and improving it from time to time, I've also felt the urgent to adapt the Wiki page... I wouldn't have done that for the reason I had to request editing rights.. but since I'm the maintainer now, I just had to. (and it's outdated now xD)
Anyway.. that page doesn't include usage rights... or information about where to find SendSS (contacts context menu and miranda menu)

Is it still ok that way? Or what exactly do you miss there?

Non the less... there's currently one good thing about our Wiki :P If you add/change a page in one language (preferable English) people will pop out of nowhere to translate it to other languages ;) This happened to SendSS's page at least... (EN,DE,PL,RU)