I have something on my wish list 😊

General
1

There are so many new things coming to life in this fantastic project almost daily - and that is really great :flexed_biceps:t2:

Thanks so much to everyone contributing :+1:t2:

I assume from reading the comments that there are many very talented programmers here who immediately understand all the new features and technical details.

I, however, belong to a different species: the “enthusiastic hobby user with a long history of xTalk languages” :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I love experimenting and learning, but I’m definitely not a pro programmer.

One thing I always appreciated in other companies was when they introduced a new feature, they sometimes also created a simple webpage explaining:

  • what the feature does,
  • why it is useful,
  • and included a small test stack to play with.

Honestly, for people like me, seeing something in action works much better than reading a technical description and pretending I understood it the first time :wink:

I would love it if we could do something similar here:
One simple webpage for each new feature, ideally with a downloadable example stack attached. This would also be a reference for new users etc.

So when a new HXT version comes out, I can download it, visit the webpages, download the test stacks, and in no time start exploring the new features.

It does not need to be fancy webpages at all. Even very small examples would already help a lot.

To get started, we could even do this directly here in Discourse. Other platforms could also work, but it would probably be best not to spread information across too many different places ?

And one more suggestion: I would put most of the information directly into the stack rather than on the webpage.

The reason is simple - I think most of us have downloaded stacks from other people and kept them in our private collections. But without the webpage, those stacks become almost useless unless the information about what they do is included within the stack itself.

What do the others think :face_with_monocle:

2

I think it would make sense to have the GitHub repository as single source of truth also for this kind of information.

Even more so when hxtpm (the new package manager) uses GitHub as distribution pipeline now.

We could do much documentation in the GitHub Wiki also for external contributions, but I have not edited pages there yet, also editing rights management might be limited.

The package manager is currently getting meta data slots, this might be a way to go forward.

This way, we have to patiently establish a good system that really works for most people and thus avoids the offering jungle that almost suffocated our predecessor platforms.

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3

For the features I usually build a small test stack (gotta make sure it works) that is then included with the repo, but I like the idea of creating a page (maybe on the wiki) and linking it to the test stack (will have to document the test stacks better)

Here is a link to the test stacks

4

Every new feature should have a documentation entry. I believe this would be a good place for this information - then it becomes a part of the project. Since we are not bound by the past, we could include URLs in the entry that point to the main repo with the example stack without actually including it in the app itself.

Release notes are another thing that seem to have lost their way over the years. I think that may something useful to get working again.

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5

If I’m not mistaken, every new feature has been documented, but I guess it’s knowing what to look for. I like the idea of having the URL in the documentation as it can just auto-load it when clicked.

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6

The strength of an open source community rests in its contributors.

While few of us can write C++, most of us can help with docs.

7

The docs get written with the new features. I think the area I would need help is making the test stacks a little more better :wink:

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8

I can certainly help with that - but in cases where a feature is not immediately obvious to me, I would still need someone to explain what it does, and why it was created :smiley:

9

Just guess, that’s all I do, or you can ask and I can help you. :wink:

10

I ask you a lot already :smiley: - I know you will always help

11

You don’t ask much.

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