It’s Friday, so here’s the first weekly report:
I spent this week mostly on reading and writing documentation and letting the community know about my project. Here are the links:
- My project page at Fedora wiki, now includes a schedule and a TODO section, where my project’s progress can hopefully be easily tracked
- My project page at MoinMoin wiki, now includes some discussion on the technical details and even some code by an other helpful Moin contributor
- My self-introduction on fedora-docs-list
- A short introduction on fedora-websites-list
- Moin 1.6 vs. 1.7 discussion on fedora-infrastructure-list
In addition to those links there’s been some IRC discussion on #fedora-docs and #moin-dev.
I also have a branch for my project on Moin’s Mercurial, see http://hg.thinkmo.de/moin/1.7-maninfo-vpv/. I’ve set up Eclipse and PyDev so that I can do Moin development and run/debug my development branch directly inside Eclipse.
I have read some man page and Texinfo documentation, I can say that I have a pretty good idea on the man page conventions in Linux, but Texinfo is a completely different beast. That was to be expected too, since man is mostly used as a short list of options but a lot of the info pages (especially from GNU) are like complete books. I have also contacted the Linux Documentation Project man page maintainer and asked his opinions about my project.
In addition to man and Texinfo documentation I have started to get to know Moin source code. I’ve also revised on Dive Into Python and I’ll take the book with me (on my laptop) for the weekend to read it even more. I’ve done some test programs on Python too, but nothing so notable that they should be released yet.
About next week: I’ll most likely start with trying to get MoinMoin to understand the man page format. Initially I thought about implementing cvs co support first, but on second though getting the man page handling working first is the best place to start. It should be a lot easier than Texinfo but still very much a part of the core functionality of this system.
So I’ll start with writing a Parser so that you can insert man source into a wiki page and it will be shown as normal HTML. The the natural next step would be to write a Formatter that exports wiki markup into man source. This way some functionality could be implemented quite soon. Then the next step would be to hook those two together so that the user would never see anything but wiki markup and everything would be still handled as man source internally. But it may be that just implementing the Parser and the Formatter is enough work for next week.
On a final note, I’ll be away for the weekend, from Friday evening UTC+3 to Sunday evening UTC+3. I’ll take my laptop with me, but I won’t have any Internet connectivity. I’ll answer any mails or IRC messages on Sunday evening. Have a nice weekend!
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