Hi Ted, I split this in a separate thread to avoid noise :)
El 23 sept 2019, a las 23:14, Brainstorms <wild.ideas@gmail.com> escribió:
Guillermo,
I'm interested in helping, but at this point, I think I'd be most helpful working at improving documentation (mainly editing) rather than working on Pharo code itself. (I'd like to work toward that, though.)
Iâve been doing a pass on the structure, and I was thinking on a rough structure as follows: 1) Intro to FFI (callouts, function and library lookup, intro to value marshalling) 2) Marshalling (sending arguments, literal arguments, more on marshalling, basic C types: ints, floats, pointers and how they are transformed to pharo objects and vice-versaâ¦) 3) Complex types: strings, unions, arrays, opaque types 4) Derived types on the Pharo side: How to design nice classes with all this 5) Callbacks 6) Memory management I did already a pass on 1), and I got blocked in 2), though I want to release a version of it this week. If youâre up for it, there are several things we can do: - review the english :) - give feedback on what is missing, what is not understandable, what can be explained better - testing the examples?
I'm still a newbie with Pharo, but I am a good writer/editor. And I expect that working with Pharo documentation would be another means of increasing my knowledge of the Pharo ecosystem -- so that's additional incentive for me.
Cool :)
I gather that the PDF books are written using Pillar, which I know nothing about. Are there resources & guides for this tool/format that would help me learn how to make & edit these kinds of documents?
Pillar is a markup syntax (from Pierâs CMS, if you know it). https://github.com/pillar-markup/pillar <https://github.com/pillar-markup/pillar> Pillar comes with a document model, parser and generators to html, pdf (through latex), and others⦠In Pillarâs readme there are the installation instructions + usage. If you check the travis file in the ffi booklet repository https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/Booklet-uFFI/blob/version2/.travi... <https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/Booklet-uFFI/blob/version2/.travi...> Youâll see it is built with pillar 7.4.1. In other words # install pillar $ git clone https://github.com/pillar-markup/pillar.git -b v7.4.1 $ cd pillar && ./scripts/build.sh && cd .. # go into the booklet repository and build the pdf $ ./pillar/build/pillar build pdf Although youâll need a mostly up-to-date latex version (latexmk required, plus several other packages, check Pillarâs readme)
Also, I've never contributed to an open source project; Pharo seems to be a good place to start doing so. I see that most of the documentation, web pages, booklets, etc. are in English so there's the advantage that English is my first language (and I actually paid attention in school :^). I'm also aware, from experience, that Documentation is rarely the first choice for developers to apply their time & enthusiasmâ¦
And itâs super important nevertheless ^^. Guille