Re: Plotting with Octave 3.0

[Francesco Potorti`]

>| >The hardest part of writing contributions for the manual is generating 
>| >the content itself, not the formating of that content. If there was an 
>| >actively maintained manual on the wiki, then I think you'd find that 
>| >some one was willing to import the good bits into the manual itself..
>| 
>| Hm.  Let's see if this one could work.
>| 
>| - someone sets up an editable web site (like a wiki) but with an
>|   additional feature: when it is opened, it contains a wikified copy of
>|   the manual.  (Either the stable version or the snapshot.)
>| 
>| - people who want to correct something open the wiki and edit the
>|   manual.  Then, after checking all the changes, they press a button
>|   that formats the changes and sends them to the maintainers.
>
>If you mean that the Texinfo markup is somehow added manually, then I
>don't see how that can happen.

I mean that the wiki interface generates a diff between the current
version of the manual and the changes introduced by the contributor.  In
the simplest istance, the manual should be text (not texinfo), and the
developers would see a diff from a text version of the manual.  This is
equivalent to receiveing manual text diffs, but using the wiki would be
easier than using the diff command on the info manual, which most people
do not use anyway.

>| That would do the job.  However, I do not know how to implement it, and
>| some details are missing.
>
>A large portion of the manual comes from the doc strings for indiviual
>functions.  Those are inserted into the overall manual during the
>Octave build process.  How would you manage that part?

When the developers see a diff arriving, they should apply it where it
belongs.  All this does not ease work for developers, but encourages bug
corrections and additions to the manual.  Passing from text diffs to a
proper Mercurial changeset then requires knowledge of Unix's programming
tools (diff, mercurial, looking through a code tree to find things) and
so coule be done by people that do not need to know Octave's code
internals.