20,741
edits
Canvas MapStructure: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
No edit summary |
|||
| Line 58: | Line 58: | ||
|author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | |author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | ||
|date=<nowiki>Wed May 14</nowiki> | |date=<nowiki>Wed May 14</nowiki> | ||
}} | |||
}} | |||
{{FGCquote | |||
|We've seen some extremeley skilled contributors making sizable contributions without them ever documenting the internals, so that getting up to scratch with things later on may be next to impossible without spending a huge amount of time, that could be equally spent on re-designing certain features/systems.<br/> | |||
<br/> | |||
This is something that we have actively worked to address in the context of Nasal/Canvas and efforts like the ND/MapStructure frameworks, i.e. those are now extensively documented, not just including "roadmaps" and "milestones", but also internal design stuff, including even step-by-step tutorials and coding examples - admittedly, this has taken up quite a bit of spare time, that could have just as well been spent "coding" - but given the wiki stats, we seem to be on the right track here, i.e. most of these articles have seen between 2k-8k views within just ~10-12 weeks, which is kinda impressive (some of our most popular articles "only" have seen 40k views in years!), but this also ensures at the same time that even if some of us were to disappear for a few months, people would still be able to pick up where we (TheTom, Philosopher, Gijs, myself) left off, no matter if this means "maintaining" our existing code - or modernizing/replacing it completely. | |||
|{{cite web |url=http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?p=204338#p204338 | |||
|title=<nowiki>Re: A long shot</nowiki> | |||
|author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | |||
|date=<nowiki>Wed Mar 26</nowiki> | |||
}} | |||
}} | |||
{{FGCquote | |||
|In professional software development circles, writing documentation is a necessary evil, as is writing unit tests - in FlightGear, people prefer to spend their time doing "fun" stuff instead for understandable reasons. Then again, some of the main building blocks and key technologies in FlightGear were developed by people who obviously understood that having sufficient docs is at least as important for a feature to survive than the actual code, just look at architectural pillars contributed by people like David Megginson (property tree) or Andy Ross (Nasal) - those are typically the same guys who were responsible for much of the original documentation targeted at core developers, no matter if it's through extensive use of doxygen comments or through dedicated design articles. | |||
|{{cite web |url=http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?p=204338#p204338 | |||
|title=<nowiki>Re: A long shot</nowiki> | |||
|author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | |||
|date=<nowiki>Wed Mar 26</nowiki> | |||
}} | |||
}} | |||
{{FGCquote | |||
|Some of our most active contributors spent little to no time ensuring that future developers will be able to continue their work - and that's a problem that will only really become obvious once someone is too busy with other aspects of their life to contribute (or even just back to answer questions). | |||
|{{cite web |url=http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?p=204338#p204338 | |||
|title=<nowiki>Re: A long shot</nowiki> | |||
|author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | |||
|date=<nowiki>Wed Mar 26</nowiki> | |||
}} | }} | ||
}} | }} | ||