[Mono-docs-list] Re: msdn-browser/monodoc intergration

[Ben Maurer]

On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 11:25 +0200, Mario Sopena wrote:
> 2005/9/24, Ben Maurer <bmaurer at andrew.cmu.edu>:
> > get some idea of what it does. So why not make this process easier, by
> > providing them a usable interface (IE, a treeview that doesn't suck in
> > firefox)?
> The reason are what Joshua already said. If the user has a great doc
> (msdn) at hand, they will just move to look there and not to use mono
> docs, because what they care is having a good doc and not where that
> doc come from (well, most part of the users). But that is just my
> opinion.

If the user is not willing to deal with the fact that our classlib docs
has mostly stubs, they are going to end up using another documentation
browser. For example, I usually use terminal server to a Windows
computer to look up docs because I can use the .net doc browser.

Now, lets say we integrate an msdn viewer. This will make it easy to get
to the "good" docs. Thus, we will increase the use of monodoc. This has
a huge side benefit: since people are inside monodoc, they can easily
write docs for stubbed methods. We could even play on this fact; we
could put a message on top of the msdn page for each member we have
stubs "Mono's free documentation only has stubs for this method. Help us
out by writing docs". We'd have to be careful not to encourge plagiarism
with this, but I think it could help us rather than hurt us.

I'd also like to remind you that most monodoc users (I'd guess upwards
of 90%) do not contribute to the documentation, and there is almost
nothing we can do to get them to do so (except maybe a bribe^Wcontest).
not including a way to get to the msdn docs is just making their life
harder, with no benefit to us.

-- Ben