[Qgis-developer] QGIS Developer Documentation

[Tim Sutton]

Dear QGIS Developers

Over the past few weeks I discussed with some of you creating a more
developer orientated manual. Today I did the first part of this work,
merging various developer centric pages from the wiki into a single
document committed to svn qgis root dir as CODING.t2t and CODING (text
rendered version meant for humans to read). I've also rendered it back
to moinmoin format and posted to the wiki as:

http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/DevelopersManual

There is a link to it now on the front page of the wiki now and I
removed several other links that this page  now replaces.

Using this approach, we can manage the document in SVN so that it can
be versioned with releases, and someone checking out an older release
snapshot will get documentation appropriate to that release. Also new
developers will have a single well constructed document to work
through to familiarise themselves with our working practices and they
automatically get it when they check out the sources. This is better
than needing to root through pages scattered about the wiki. Many of
these wiki pages also duplicate each other and / or contain out of
date information. Wiki pages that are now deprecated have been updated
to contain a note directing the user to the new unified manual. An
additional benefit of using CODING.t2t is that we can generate LaTeX
sources from the documentation and I will be working with Otto in the
future to incorporate a developers guide into the QGIS manual.

I've added a section for authors at the bottom of CODING.t2t and have
tried to acknowledge those who wrote the original documentation - if
your name is missing please add it to the bottom of CODING.t2t.

Lastly, I will be adding more pages from the wiki to the document
where they make sense to be part of this guide. If anyone has
additional suggestions for inclusions, please add the page link to the
bottom of CODING.t2t and I will work to integrate it into the
document.

It will be great if we can develop this resource in the future to make
it as clear as possible for new developers how to participate in the
project.

Best regards

Tim

-- 
Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Member - Release  Manager
Visit http://qgis.org for a great open source GIS
openModeller Desktop Developer
Visit http://openModeller.sf.net for a great open source ecological
niche modelling tool
Home Page: http://tim.linfiniti.com
Skype: timlinux
Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net