On 07/01/18 12:28, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:

The documentation is brought up to date at every release: all new
identifiers are documented and the documentation regenerated.
If you look in the bugtracker, you will see that I regularly fix
documentation issues.


Thanks.  The user's guide, programmer's guide, and language reference manual all say they are for version 3.0.2.  Perhaps the current version didn't require any documentation changes?

If you think it is too terse in places, please report them in the
bugtracker. I will always fix all such reports.



That really wasn't my point.  From the point of view of someone just coming to fpc,  the documentation is the "face" of the product.  If that face is ugly or hard to navigate, they are likely to just walk away.   Getting involved in the bugtracker is for people already invested in fpc, and familiar enough with it to not *need* the documentation.

It is all there, user's guide, language reference, programmer's guide,
Reference to *all* rtl units. What do you think is missing ?

See https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var


Perhaps the rtl is more complete than the rest - I'll take your word for it.  I know it's a tremendous amount of work!

The class library chart on that page is nice, but it's 11 years old (dated 2007).

index:
RTL: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/rtl/index-8.html
FCL: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/fcl/index-8.html


An auto-generated index of all identifiers used across all modules is useful, if you know what you're looking for.  Say I was looking for something like a Timer class - where do I start?  Would it be in the rtl, the fcl, or somewhere else?  Would it be named Timer, TTimer, or something else?  I can't find an index that has an entry for "timer" and points to all the timer-related things.

Packages are another story. I checked the packages. There are roughly 16.000 classes.
I didn't count methods/functions, but they surely are a multiple of that.
There is 1 documenter: me.


Pardon my ignorance, but I take it that "packages" is more like an un-curated repository of contributions rather than an official part of the fpc distribution?  If so, I wasn't aware of that.  It would explain a big part of my frustration.

-Jim

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