Remember: Documentation is top priority

August 16, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 2 Comments 

I always thought that writting documentation is much more difficult than coding. This is because, writting documenation and guides, is kinda boring(?), requires a lot of our free time and it is not as fun as coding. All of these arguments IMHO are true but is documentation really needed?

During my six month Gentoo journey I faced a common problem: “I want to write a python/gnome/qt ebuild. How on earth am I suppose to do it??”

Looking through Gentoo docs I ‘ve found some guides about writting games and python ebuilds. Maybe there are more, I haven’t checked. Those guides are quite handy for anybody who wants to write a quick ebuild without making serious mistakes.

Eclasses usage is another tricky thing. Based on my experiense, I believe that the most difficult part is to understand how they work and when they should be used on an ebuild. E.g., a Qt4 ebuild doesn’t always require to inherit qt4 eclass because it might wants cmake functions to build and install. In this case, despite the fact that it is a pure Qt4 package, you need to inherit the cmake-utils eclass. That was a simple example but I believe you got the point :)

This blog post is a kind request to all fellow developers,  to make some time and write proper ebuild guides ( and keep them updated based according to eclasses’ latest changes ) for the sake of developers and users. People tend to believe that ebuild writting is quite hard because of all the e-* functions ( wrappers ) and ebuild  phases. Prove them wrong :)

ps: A Qt4 ebuild guide, can be found here

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