[Mono-dev] Mono.Addins in Monodoc

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> What's nice about using Mono.Addins for all this?

I do not see the use of Mono.Addins actually solving any real
documentation problems.   

The issues that I have with Monodoc today are:

	* Some of the internals are bad (we have two lookup mechanisms, 
	  one uses tree expressions, one uses custom-url expressions,
	  it would be nice to unify them).

	* The tree was supposed to be compact, it is not, its too large,
	  but that we can live with.

	* Editing in the ECMA provider is hard, but Mike has a plan for
	  that.

	* The current provider API is suboptimal (see first point), and
	  before we launch ourselves into a large task to have plugins,
	  I would like the interface to be cleaned up, and some of the
	  most horrid hacks to go away. 

	* The editor needs to be able to "lint" or check if a see cref
	  is invalid for example and issue a warning.

Then there are the more fundamental issues:

	* We have not yet upgraded everything to 2.0 apis.

	* We do not have enough documentation, and in general, we do 
	  not have a culture of people editing and maintaining the docs.

	* The contribution stuff works, but reviewing the docs for .NET-
	  APIs is time consuming because lots of people are cut-and-
	  pasting from MSDN, so I have to review every contribution and
	  sometimes I just ignore the contributions altogether and just
	  go for the easy stuff that I know is not copy-paste (Gtk#)

Adopting Mono.Addins might have some technical advantages, but I think
that overall it will get in the way of some required internal work that
needs to take place before we start considering more features.