Re: Documentation [Was: I resign as Guile maintainer]

["Greg J. Badros" <gjb at cs dot washington dot edu>]

Andrew Chadwick <andrew.chadwick@symbian.com> writes:

> guile-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com writes:
> [snip]
> > I'll also briefly take this opportunity to state what I claim is the
> > most significant problem with Guile:
> > 
> > Lack of reasonable documentation.
> > 
> > If I had to choose among extension languages right now, I'd be stunned
> > if Guile were my choice.  Only after the documentation improves will
> > people come to Guile to build a larger support infrastructure.  It's
> > just too damn hard to get started with Guile the way things are now.
> 
> Well, the only reasonable thing I could do at this point would be to
> volunteer some of my spare time. Please, who is coordinating the
> documentation effort?

Excellent-- volunteers are tremendously appreciated, and no contribution 
is to small. 

I believe I'm coordinating the documentation effort (though if someone
has more time, I'm happy to just manage the docstrings).  My first goal
is a docstring extraction system similar to Scwm's.  In parallel,
plain-text documentation can be written by any who would like.  We can
add markup or convert to TeXInfo later.  Let us begin discussion on an
outline of the non-reference material sections that we need.  We could
use R[45]RS and just add sections for Guile-specific notions.
Alternatively, maybe one of the other Scheme-based scripting language
has documentation that we can make use of as our starting point.

Greg