Hi Mihir, I am a MacPorts user and port maintainer. I have a suggestion, but am 
not a member, so do not take my advice as canon.


> On Mar 23, 2019, at 1:52 PM, Mihir Luthra <1999mihir.lut...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I was thinking to add an 8th section which gives a small high level tour of 
> the codebase to a newcomer joining the community.
> I personally would only be able to give tour of trace mode, but that section 
> can be populated with other topics as well later.
> 

Improvement of any documentation should be welcome.

However, my impression is that the guide document is limited in scope to what 
is useful to either a MacPorts end user or a port maintainer, plus some 
logistics of participating in the MacPorts community. I do not know if this 
limitation in scope is intentional, nor if topics such as base development 
would be welcome in the guide.

I think that the Wiki on MacPorts’ Trac server https://trac.macports.org/wiki 
could better place for covering those topics, since to my knowledge the Wiki is 
open to any topics relating to MacPorts. Some advantages of the Wiki are that 
it is more “live” in the sense of being able to edit it and see changes 
immediately, rather than having to rebuild the entire guide (I do not know if 
this is done automatically). I would think that the Wiki would be a better 
place at least temporarily for working on topics that would be rapidly 
changing, and are independent of topics in the existing guide. Some downsides 
are that the Wiki is not usable offline, and that it uses a syntax rather 
different from docbook/adoc. The Wiki is also open to editing by anyone.

Although the main website and guide mention the Trac Wiki, maybe they should 
better advertise that’s where advanced topics not covered in the guide might 
reside. Any articles added on this topic should be indexed on a main page 
somewhere like https://trac.macports.org/wiki#MacPortsDevelopment so that they 
are not orphaned.

There could still be a better alternative to both the Wiki and the guide which 
I haven’t thought of.


Thank you for your interest in participating in GSoC with MacPorts, Mihir. I 
hope this helps!

Christopher A. Chavez

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