First of all, I think the fact that the pad must be updated after drawing a histogram in order to get its stats box should be highlighted on this page. I had to search into the forum in order to find out why the given example segfaulted, and apparently I am not the only one in this case…
In addition, what about adding a non-official wiki to the documentation ? In a first time it could just contain the same content as classes descriptions, and then root users could just add precisions they find useful, as the present case. According to this forum there seem to have been one a long time ago at root.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/ROOT/, why has it been stopped ?
This is just a suggestion, maybe you have arguments against that.
[quote=“luigi”]…or maybe use the “user contributed notes” phylosophy that the php site is using (see for example it.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php ). [/quote]I personnaly prefer the wiki philosophy, since the amount of “user notes” grow and complexify with time, while a wiki cleans itself from junk. The example you provide is a good one : who will read the whole page ? And how many duplicates contributions does it contain ? Anyway, just my two cents.
[quote=“luigi”]But probably this requires some kind of moderator and so additional resources are stolen from the ROOT team…[/quote]I’m not sure about that. As long as the wiki (or whatever) would be officially non-official, it would be the responsability of the user to understand what he reads. Anyway if needed I’m sure there would be moderators candidates, and no need to add work to ROOT staff.
I completely agree; let’s see what Olivier, the master of ROOT’s graphics system, says about it.
The problem is exactly the non-official part. We are afraid of having to maintain a non-official and thus presumably also regularly “sub-optimal” set of docs. I really don’t want to spoil anyone’s enthusiasm here, but even though I am a member of the ROOT dev team and even though I have been using it for many years already I still get things wrong which then need to be corrected by the package maintainers (like Olivier in your case). So I know what I’m talking about here.
Nevertheless I like the idea. And I think that there might be several people out there who would be willing to contribute. What do you think - would it be possible to host this somewhere else, outside the root.cern.ch domain? That way it’s clear that it’s not the “official” doc, and anyway whoever sets it up can do whatever they want. I assume that we would link it, and maybe even include it in the site’s searches if it’s technically possible. Of course that will also depend on the quality of that site. This is just my personal opinion, I cannot speak for the team here (also because most of the team is still on vacation). But having a demo (or even a mock-up) would be good.
Btw, THtml’s doc can already contain a wiki-link is it’s set up correctly; DESY’s H1 asked for it for its class doc.
Because it did not make sense in the context we were using it; we prefer this forum, email, chats on the corridor, and phone calls When it comes to web sites we’re much happier with a real CMS like drupal.
