[Fwd: Description Document ?]

[David Philippi]

I'm forwarding the message to the list so that more people may read
through it. I think the idea of providing documentation is a good one
and I'll try to answer questions as good as I can.
Surely it needs more structure but before you can put structure into
documentation there needs to be raw material to work with. ;-)

One question I see - plf means "pingus level file".
About how other people make sense of the code: I don't know about all of
the code so far but when I started to really work on it, the code was
such a tangled mess that I couldn't see anything. So I simply begun to
do some basic cleanup work thereby uncovering new layers of information
to my eyes and getting new insights. Fortunately I soon got Ingo to join
this effort, otherwise the more complex part of the cleanup may not have
been possible.
Most of the time I wrote new code I simply asked Ingo for a starting
point and walked through the code from there. Fortunately the code is
mature enough that you can very often simply work on a part and assume
that the surrounding code will do what it should do.

Bye David

-----Forwarded Message-----
From: John August <address@hidden>
To: David Philippi <address@hidden>
Subject: Description Document ?
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 14:04:19 +1100

David,

Hopefully Pingus with the new library will happen sometime. But, in the
meantime, I'm willing to develop documentation a bit.

You can see a start below.  Its the sort of thing I'd have been after
when first approaching the code ...  something a bit easier to read than
just the code itself.  It seems new people get involved without any
documentation; I guess some people can just leap into the code and make
sense of it without effort (I know it takes me some effort ...).

Obviously, things need more work ...  I could draw on some of the
material in the DRT document (though I've never managed to get it to
work), but do you think documentation useful ?  It would make life
easier for new participants.

Or ...  more specifically, could yourself and others afford the time to
answer questions when it would be taking you away from actual coding ?

If yourself (and others on the list) are willing to answer questions and
have an interest in developing documentation, I'm willing to develop the
document below some more ...

Please let me know.