19 January, 2012

How great would it be if...

I have been constantly thinking about something in the last months. Unconsciously, it all started when I did my first contribution to GNOME, then I got addicted, and more and more contributions came, and together with that, more research, reference manuals I had to read, APIs I had to use, the GOPW (GNOME Outreach Program for Women)... and then there it was, a NEED!

How many of you did not feel that documentation was incomplete or non understandable at some point and were desperately looking for an example or source of inspiration?? In my case, I usually look in some project under git.gnome.org, and it helps in most of the cases. What about if we had some kind of 'Google Code Search' tool that would search in all the available code at git.gnome.org? Something like a 'GNOME Code Search'! How great would that be??

What do you guys think? Which approach would you take for doing something like this?

9 comments:

  1. Can't agree more !

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  2. If MXR (http://mxr.mozilla.org/) only supported Git... ;-)

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  3. Mozilla is investing in a LLVM-based replacement for MXR, called DXR, but the main developer is a bit too busy. You GNOME folks could invest a bit in it, it would be a pretty good investment ;-)

    try it:
    http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/

    the DXR software:
    https://wiki.mozilla.org/DXR

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  4. That's a great idea!

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  5. what could be a great feature for this incredible idea, is to have the possibility of adding side notes/comments in particular lines telling things like "this is how u connect to DBUS" and then index those comments for future searching.

    +1000 (!)

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  6. locademiaz: What you propose is called "source code comments" and has been available in source code for the last 40 years. First things first.

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  7. Coincidentally I just read this which contains the tools to exactly create this index:

    http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html

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  8. We can setup GNOME mirror at github.com

    As for me it's better migrate git.gnome.org to self-hosted gitorious and make searches there.

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  9. @andre klapper: I was referring to something more collaborative, to mark some nice discover that the original author had probably overlook b/c of his own humility (!)
    anyway, I would mark your comment as #funny ;)

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