[Bf-committers] improving developer documentation

[Tom M]

I'd like to organize an effort to improve the documentation for use by
new developers.

It would be excellent for those who have begun to work on Blender or
those who remember their 'first steps with Blender' if you could email
me areas you had particular trouble with ie things like building from
source gotchas you needed to overcome, difficulties you had in
locating information needed in the source code, or figuring out where
to ask questions, etc.  Or at a higher level references you needed to
use for algorithm design.  As well as any additional resources you'd
recommend.

Also it would be good to get an idea of what previous development
experience you had, ie whether you have worked on previous open source
projects.  If you are a professional programmer, the build
environments you've used etc

As a first step I'll likely transfer the current developer docs to the wiki

http://www.blender.org/cms/Development.81.0.html

as well as integrate the stuff that is wiki only, or in the blender
/docs folder in the source.

Then I'll work on adopting best practices from other open source
development projects developers guides and resources.  See below for
some open source developer documentation from other projects.

LetterRip

Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/

OpenOffice
http://development.openoffice.org/
http://api.openoffice.org/DevelopersGuide/DevelopersGuide.html

Bugzilla
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/developer.html

Python
http://www.python.org/dev/

Darwin - good points - quick start guide, tech overview, development
learning paths
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/index.html

Gnome - good points - 'helping', release planning,
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/
http://developer.gnome.org/helping/

Ogre
http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=74&Itemid=87
http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page