Hear yee, hear yee. By royal decree Monday December 19th 2005 has been designated official Document D-Bus Day or DDDD for short. Please join us in #dbus on freenode.net. I will be in there from 10:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST to direct the efforts and hopefully others will be there when I am not.

The goal is to freshen up the API docs and get coverage in areas that need more love. So if you are always complaining that D-Bus docs suck now is your chance to be part of the fix.

How should I prepare?

Get the sources from CVS:

cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/dbus login
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/dbus co dbus

and look through the sources as well as the documents. Then figure out where you might like to contribute.

Join the D-Bus mailing list

What format are the docs written in?

They are written in the Doxygen format. You can look at the manual here and compare it to how we do things in the D-Bus source.

How do I submit my contributions?

Learn how to use cvs diff to make a patch:

cvs diff -u [filename] > descriptive_filename.patch

and then submit it to the dbus list along with a short description (files modified along with the functions documented)

How do I avoid duplicating work?

This is why we will be on IRC. Jump in and declare what you are going to work on or ask to be assigned an area. I will try to make sure no one will be stepping on each others toes. Depending on how many people participate this might be easy or hard. However if there are a few conflicts that shouldn’t be too bad since we are trying to get people involved and colliding while having lots of docs is always better than no collisions and no docs. I’m going to try and get patches in as soon as I see and review them so update from CVS frequently (like before you submit a patch.)

Hope to see you there. Remember, the better documented D-Bus is, the cooler the apps will be that use it. Only you can be a facilitator of cool!

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