Google Season of Docs Ideas

This is the Haiku brainstorm page for the ​Google Season of Docs.

Perspective writers: This page should give you an idea of what documentation projects that may be available for Haiku.

Haiku API

The current main documentation goal for Haiku at this time, is to finish documenting the Haiku API. ​https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/

The API was largely inherited from BeOS, unfortunately the documentation for it was not released under an open source license. It can still be used as an example of what we have in mind: ​https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/

The idea is to give an overview of how to write applications for Haiku, by going though the different functional parts of the API (called "kits"). In each kit, there should be an overview of the functionality at medium-high level, as well as a more detailed explanation of each class and method.

We expect people referring this documentation to be either seasoned Haiku programmers, using it as a reference, or programmers discovering Haiku but already having some experience writing applications for other operating systems. Therefore, we do not need to make this a course for complete begginners (the separate "Learning to Program with Haiku" book is designed for that).

The Haiku API documentation is generated using Doxygen, which allows to more easily cross-reference it with the sourcecode. However, it is not stored in the same files as the sourcecode, making it easier for documentation to be worked on as a separate tasks from writing the code. You can check the sourcefiles for the documentation here: ​https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/docs/user

Other ideas

Discuss on Haiku development mailing list other possible documentation ideas to fill gaps that Haiku may have.