Deltachat-desktop: Documentation for using / developing

[Simon-Laux]

We should add some kind of documentation, especially for the more advanced features like logging.

Like for logging it might be:

• Logging (what gets logged / introduction sentence what it is)
• Logging parameters
• Content and Structure of the Log files

Maybe we can still fit the longing part in the README, but thats not a long term solution..
Sooner or later we should think about how we document those things ( I'm not talking about code documentation, just use- and how things work-documentation at the surface perspective)

[Simon-Laux]

Whats your perspective on this?

[Jikstra]

Hmm. Not really sure if this is worth it. I would prefer having some --help which shows the logging options.

[ralphtheninja]

We are already documenting in this fashion. If you feel there's something that's missing, just add it to the README. When it comes to documenting logging, I don't really see the need to be too detailed. Bare minimum is to document where the logs can be found.

[Simon-Laux]

Hmm. Not really sure if this is worth it. I would prefer having some --help which shows the logging options.

Adding a man page would be cool, but the help command is better for now, cause it will work on windows, too.

[Jikstra]

Adding a man page would be cool, but the help command is better for now, cause it will work on windows, too.

Normally you only document the usage of the program/the configuration in a man page, not how to start hacking on it. Besides that you can't really roll out man pages without copying them so some special "system" directory. So I think it's fine to document the logging command line options, everything else is over the top. At least outside of a DEVELOPMENT/README.md.

[Simon-Laux]

How about enabling github's wiki functionality?
That way we could have more information without making the readme too big.

The only downside to github's wiki is, that it could easily get deprecated when we don't update it. (but to some extend this also applies to the readme)

[Simon-Laux]

I would say for the logging I'll add a section to the readme and for the future we might find a better way than writing everything into the readme. So I would keep this issue up for further discussion.

[Jikstra]

Is the github wiki also part of the repository files? So that if i clone the repo, i also have the docs? If not i'm against having a github wiki and prefer a docs folder with some .md files. But I don't think we have to document a lot besides logging? What do you want to document?

[ralphtheninja]

Is the github wiki also part of the repository files? So that if i clone the repo, i also have the docs?

Nope.

[Simon-Laux]

I can't think of much at the moment. I'm sure we get more stuff worth documenting soon, though.

How about having a part of the documentation that acts like a help site?
That way we could add a help button to (as example) the settings page that opens a page which explains every option in detail. (only thing with that idea is that we need to think about having this site offline(no google translator and alike) or online(possibly a privacy risk))

[Simon-Laux]

I'll close this now, we can discuss this later in the forum or reopen this issue when its relevant again.