[Xapian-discuss] GSoC Reunion + Documentation Sprint

[olly at survex.com]

I wrote:
> We're also going to be holding a documentation sprint on Monday and
> Tuesday next week in San Francisco.  If anyone else wants to take
> part (remotely would work) let me know.  The only plan we have so far
> is to come up with a plan over the weekend.

We made a lot of useful progress, and the "Getting Started" guide now
covers almost everything which the old xapian-core documentation does
(and we noted the few omissions as "todo" items).  We worked through
the list of missing documentation on the wiki, and also pruned some
out-dated information from there.

The structure of the guide has been adjusted a little - notably, there
is now a section for "advanced features" to house topics which are less
likely to be of interest to new users.

You can browse the latest version here:

http://getting-started-with-xapian.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

The above version has example code in Python, but the sources are set up
to allow translating to cover other languages via Sphinx macros.  It is
possible to translate the code examples, and also references to classes,
methods, etc in the text itself - e.g. xapian.Document in the Python
version would be Xapian::Document in the C++ version, XapianDocument in
PHP, etc.

Currently we have a complete set of Python examples, and partial
translations to C++ and to PHP.  If anyone would like to help fill out
these translations, or to produce a version for another languages, that
would be great.

We talked about whether an online sprint would work.  Getting people
together physically works well because everyone is then in the same
timezone and there are fewer external distractions, but it's also costly
unless people are already in the same place, which limits us to holding
about one a year in practice.  So an online sprint seems worth trying,
but we haven't thought about dates yet.

Cheers,
    Olly