The lack of detailed, current documentation for Twisted is an ongoing problem, especially given how revolutionary and difficult to understand its underlying programming concepts are. Dave Cook's "just use it for months" comment is not at all off the mark, but it's a frustrating and unproductive way to learn. It particularly annoys me that the code contains so few docstrings -- Python's especially useful and convenient way to document your code -- and there are so many nonsensical "cute" names like jelly, banana, etc. Putting my money where my mouth is, I would be willing to contribute a few hundred bucks to getting some more docstrings in the code and, consequently, to a somewhat better lore-generated API specification. One thought would be to run a "bounty" program using an actively-generated, hyperlinked web rendition of the latest Twisted SVN code. For example, participant donors could mark defs, classes, or blocks of code to indicate where they're willing to "sponsor" docstrings, and they could also click on newly added docstrings in such "sponsored" code portions to indicate acceptance and make a bounty payment from their contribution to the fund or whatever to the person who wrote the docstring. The proportion of docstring submissions accepted by a given donor could be a score that potential writers could look at when deciding whether to do the work or not. Any thoughts on that idea? Anyone willing to step up as a co-contributor to such an effort, both financially and with some Nevow coding? --- Ed Suominen Registered Patent Agent Open-Source Software Author (yes, both...) Web Site: http://www.eepatents.com
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 10:21:16AM -0800, Ed Suominen wrote: [...]
Putting my money where my mouth is, I would be willing to contribute a few hundred bucks to getting some more docstrings in the code and, consequently, to a somewhat better lore-generated API specification.
Minor correction: the API docs are generated by epydoc (with a bunch of hacks -- see admin/epyrun in a SVN checkout). Lore processes the Howtos. -Andrew.
participants (2)
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Andrew Bennetts
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Ed Suominen