[MetaCRS] CS-Map documentation
Howard Butler
hobu.inc at gmail.com
Mon Mar 23 11:10:53 EDT 2009
Norm,
I saw you committed a preliminary version of the CS-Map
documentation. In your commit message, you lamented 20 years of
different people using different tools to maintain the document.
MapServer doesn't have 20 years of lineage, but it does have numerous
folks editing the documentation all the time, and it has iterated a
number of solutions to multi-user documentation efforts.
I thought I would point out the documentation tool that in my opinion
has been a highly successful documentation boon to the MapServer
project -- Sphinx. Sphinx allows us to drive our website's
documentation using hierarchical sub-documents that are managed in
subversion. This is similar to the Doxygen approach, but the
documents primarily exist *outside* the source code, and the editing
of the documentation is done in a plain text-like markup called
reStructured Text. Doxygen or even Docbook's markup, while providing
easy diffs and plain text access, makes it quite hard to casually edit
things. I think casual editing is also what most frequently happens
when docs go into maintenance mode, and making it very easy to do
helps keep the docs actively maintained.
Additionally, Sphinx supports output formats other than HTML,
including PDF and Windows Compiled Help. MapServer currently only
provides HTML and PDF for its website.
MapServer docs subversion tree -- http://svn.osgeo.org/mapserver/trunk/docs/
MapServer rendered html docs - http://mapserver.org/docs
MapServer rendered pdf docs - http://mapserver.org/MapServer.pdf
http://sphinx.pocoo.org/
Howard
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