Hello all. This is my first posting here. I've volunteered to help the doc end of the Tiny-COBOL project, as well as anything else that I can contribute.
I've seen some historical discussion of doc formats, which Texinfo seemed to win. Long-term, I think that man pages and SGML docs done with the sgmltools package would be "the right thing" as far as user docs go. I can post PS and PDF versions whenever I have anything for people to look at. Texinfo isn't a problem if people really believe that this is the right way to go. (No vi fans in the group? I know that Texinfo has matured beyond an emacs-specific help environment, but think that SGML has more of a future.) I am an SGML bigot, I guess - I even wrote a Dummies book on SGML a few years back.
I'm a Perl/C programmer, UNIX sysadmin, and tech writer during the day, and I'd like to help you out at night ;-) I'd appreciate hearing from anyone (Glen?) regarding doc plans, ideas, what you'd like me to do, and so on.
Nopw some build issues at my end. I checked out the latest sources, ran into a #include glitch (on my stock Red Hat 6.1 system, you need /usr/include/db1/dh.h instead of /usr/include/db.h because the latter doesn't define BTREEINFO, etc.). I got everything working but haven't checked anything back in yet, because I don't want to accidentally start by mudding the water - after all, I'm new here.
I also encountered an issue when running the test - I ended up modifying lib/basicio.c to use a kludged fgets rather than the deprecated gets. Again, not checked in, because my fgets change is a hack, hardwired to input lines that are a maximum of 80 characters in length. This seems appropriate, but again, I don't want to start getting involved by mudding the water for anyone.
I'd enjoy hearing from anyone who has any doc ideas. Some things that I think would be useful initially would be some specific info on the process for adding and running tests. The fgets/gets issue I mentioned above is the reasons that a man page for them might be something useful for me to start with that has some immediate value.
Hope to hear from anyone when you get the chance. BTW, I am interested in this project because (1) it's the right thing, and (2) because the MicroFocus and ACUCOBOL runtime licensing models for Linux are so odious.
Bill ("vonhagen" on SourceForge, "wvh@gethip" to the rest of the universe)
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Hello all. This is my first posting here. I've volunteered to help the doc end of the Tiny-COBOL project, as well as anything else that I can contribute.
I've seen some historical discussion of doc formats, which Texinfo seemed to win. Long-term, I think that man pages and SGML docs done with the sgmltools package would be "the right thing" as far as user docs go. I can post PS and PDF versions whenever I have anything for people to look at. Texinfo isn't a problem if people really believe that this is the right way to go. (No vi fans in the group? I know that Texinfo has matured beyond an emacs-specific help environment, but think that SGML has more of a future.) I am an SGML bigot, I guess - I even wrote a Dummies book on SGML a few years back.
I'm a Perl/C programmer, UNIX sysadmin, and tech writer during the day, and I'd like to help you out at night ;-) I'd appreciate hearing from anyone (Glen?) regarding doc plans, ideas, what you'd like me to do, and so on.
Nopw some build issues at my end. I checked out the latest sources, ran into a #include glitch (on my stock Red Hat 6.1 system, you need /usr/include/db1/dh.h instead of /usr/include/db.h because the latter doesn't define BTREEINFO, etc.). I got everything working but haven't checked anything back in yet, because I don't want to accidentally start by mudding the water - after all, I'm new here.
I also encountered an issue when running the test - I ended up modifying lib/basicio.c to use a kludged fgets rather than the deprecated gets. Again, not checked in, because my fgets change is a hack, hardwired to input lines that are a maximum of 80 characters in length. This seems appropriate, but again, I don't want to start getting involved by mudding the water for anyone.
I'd enjoy hearing from anyone who has any doc ideas. Some things that I think would be useful initially would be some specific info on the process for adding and running tests. The fgets/gets issue I mentioned above is the reasons that a man page for them might be something useful for me to start with that has some immediate value.
Hope to hear from anyone when you get the chance. BTW, I am interested in this project because (1) it's the right thing, and (2) because the MicroFocus and ACUCOBOL runtime licensing models for Linux are so odious.
Bill ("vonhagen" on SourceForge, "wvh@gethip" to the rest of the universe)
Bill,
I've started adding information on the project Wiki page, as time allows. Take a look at http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
and refactor mercilessly.