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Wed, 04 Jul 2012

doc.perl6.org and p6doc


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Background

Earlier this year I tried to assess the readiness of the Perl 6 language, compilers, modules, documentation and so on. While I never got around to publish my findings, one thing was painfully obvious: there is a huge gap in the area of documentation.

There are quite a few resources, but none of them comprehensive (most comprehensive are the synopsis, but they are not meant for the end user), and no single location we can point people to.

Announcement

So, in the spirit of xkcd, I present yet another incomplete documentation project: doc.perl6.org and p6doc.

The idea is to take the same approach as perldoc for Perl 5: create user-level documentation in Pod format (here the Perl 6 Pod), and make it available both on a website and via a command line tool. The source (documentation, command line tool, HTML generator) lives at https://github.com/perl6/doc/. The website is doc.perl6.org.

Oh, and the last Rakudo Star release (2012.06) already shipped p6doc.

Status and Plans

Documentation, website and command line tool are all in very early stages of development.

In the future, I want both p6doc SOMETHING and http://doc.perl6.org/SOMETHING to either document or link to documentation of SOMETHING, be it a built-in variable, an operator, a type name, routine name, phaser, constant or... all the other possible constructs that occur in Perl 6. URLs and command line arguments specific to each type of construct will also be available (/type/SOMETHING URLs already work).

Finally I want some way to get a "full" view of a type, ie providing all methods from superclasses and roles too.

Help Wanted

All of that is going to be a lot of work, though the most work will be to write the documentation. You too can help! You can write new documentation, gather and incorporate already existing documentation with compatible licenses (for example synopsis, perl 6 advent calendar, examples from rosettacode), add more examples, proof-read the documentation or improve the HTML generation or the command line tool.

If you have any questions about contributing, feel free to ask in #perl6. Of course you can also; create pull requests right away :-).

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