[Firebird-docs] Which kind of docs?

[Paul V. <pa...@vi...>]

Hello again,

Which kind of docs should we produce? Well, there doesn't have to be
consensus on that: everybody who is willing to spend unpaid time
writing docs, can - in principle at least - work on the document that
he/she finds important. Of course it would be nice to know from each
other what we are doing, especially when it comes to large documents
-- or else we might wind up with six Embedded SQL Guides.

Personally, I find it most important to produce a comprehensive core
documentation set, more or less like the PDF books that Borland ships
with InterBase. Such a set could (should?) contain:

- a DDL guide
- a DML guide
- an SQL reference
- an API guide
- a Programmer's Guide
- ...
- ...

For now, the free Borland IB6 beta docs are still very usable with
Firebird, provided you also have the Release Notes etc. that come with
the consecutive Firebird versions. But InterBase and Firebird _will_
diverge more and more, so in a couple of years' time this is really
going to be a problem.

Since I've been playing around with the API lately I would like to
start with an API Guide myself. But I realize that this is not the
most urgently needed guide, so I might be persuaded into writing
something else instead.


Important
=========
The Borland InterBase 6 Beta Docs are free in the sense that you don't
have to pay for them - but they *are* copyrighted. This implies that
it's perfectly OK to use all kinds of _INFORMATION_ we find in those
docs, but it's illegal to copy _TEXT_ (even portions) from them.
We'd better keep that in mind whilst writing our docs, or else!


I hope to hear more ideas from you all.

Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog