Day: May 13, 2007

It has a very interesting item in the Applications section!

I wrote this a few times already, but documentation is something that needs to be repeated over and over again. Until it bores you so hard that you will do it just so that the idiot who keeps repeating about it, would stop. Exactly.

For that reason I keep repeating it so often to myself, that I myself will get bored of hearing myself repeating that it’s extremely important. In the end it’s all about self-inducting psychological tricks, indeed. Forcing yourself, forcing myself.

Today I started cross-referencing Tinymail’s manuals and documentation. I for example created links to the API reference manual and started pages with some minimal documentation about types being mentioned in a manual.

My opinion is that any software is pure vaporware until it’s fully documented for at least its target audience. This means that Tinymail will be vaporware until its documentation is more than perfect (as my goal for the project is to get it better than the current best). Undocumented software by definition sucks in my opinion. Doing free software isn’t a valid reason for having no documentation.

Unit testing, though, has been slipping a little bit (luckily not completely). I’m hoping to see GNOME Buildbot becoming ready and integrated with GMAE so that this will psychologically force me and other contributors into making sure that it will never slip again.