It has been listed as a task for a long time.
Realize that mod_wsgi is a one man project. I have very liitle time to
work on mod_wsgi as it is. It isn't like I get people donating me huge
amounts of money such that I don't still have to work for a living.
:-)
Also why should I be making high quality documentation for someone
else's project. Frankly that is a beef I have had with various
projects, they assume that I will do things for them rather them
developing their own decent documentation for the users of their
product.
That all said, I have had plans for quite a long time to develop
documentation of great detail specifically focused around Django, but
ultimately it comes down to what is in it for me. There ultimately is
a limit of what I am prepared to do for free.
BTW you should ensure you watch my PyCon talk where I do use Django as
an example.
http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2010/06/sydney-pycon-modwsgi-talk-slides.html
Can you also perhaps add your suggestions as a comment against that
issue in the issue tracker.
Graham
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Yes understandabilty is an issue. My bigger complaint about third
party documentation provided with other packages is incompleteness.
Not only is important stuff missing, the whole document is written by
developers who generally have a better base understanding of things.
Thus often not real good for absolute newbies.
I can't claim my documentation is perfect either as information is all
other place and I don't have the absolute newbie step by step
tutorial. Either way, I do get annoyed though when people will not
even bother to try and read the documentation in the first place and
who instead come to you expecting to be to spoon fed on every minor
point along the way. These people seem to be totally oblivious to the
fact that they are wasting your time. They treat you like a help desk
who is only there to serve them.
Being a bit of a perfectionist, I really do want to do some better
documentation. Because I expect the tools to probably work well for
me, I was looking at using Pages on a Mac/iPad and pushing drafts up
to the iWork site with people being invited to participate to review
and comment on them. It would thus effectively be a evolving document
over an extended period with possible periodic drops to a public site.
The issue with putting all that effort in is how you get some due
compensation. I am not too keen on the idea of publishing a dead tree
version. Plus from what I have seen to date, people in the Python
community are tight arses when it comes to money. When web2py author
put his documentation on scribd and charged people for it, there were
so many complaints.
I should highlight that I am not expecting to be rolling in money from
this as unless there is some angel out there with lots of money to
throw around, will never get back what I have put into this. Right now
the number of donations amount to a lot less that 1% of downloads, so
few that one would need a lot of zeros in that percentage after the
decimal point. It is more about getting at least some sense of feeling
that people value what one does. Any donations nearly always end up
buying stuff for my two and half year old daughter such as clothes,
toys, books or as is developing, games to feed her growing iPhone game
addiction.
I have been thinking of late about making the request for donations a
bit more prominent and also make suggestions for how much.
Specficially looking at suggesting that people who use mod_wsgi for
personal sites contribute what it costs them for one month of web
hosting for their site. If a commercial organization using it for
their own site, then two times that value. If a managed hosting
service that is making money off other people, then three times what
they charge their customers for one month of their hosting services.
When you look at this that isn't a great deal of money and for
personal users is usually going to be less that $20. You still will
not get many people feeling they get enough out of the software to
make a contribution, but hopefully it may encourage something more
than the small number of contributions that get now. That way I feel
it is a bit more valued and I will continue to put in that extra
effort that I do when you compare what I do to other open source
projects.
> so (partly for my own sanity but
> also to help the community) I sometimes re-write it in the simplest
> possible terms (e.g. South and Django: http://gist.github.com/453421 )
> and since Django has the largest(?) user base of all the possible
> applications I thought the Django integration page on the mod_wsgi
> wiki would be a good place to start as a template for the other
> integration guides.
>
> The bit about me being 'a good sub-editor' with 'a passion for making
> instructions as simple as possible' means I'd be happy to start
> editing a draft of that particular page for approval. If that helps at
> all.
I'll definitely get back to you if I go down this path or some better
documentation as describe above.
Graham
> And thanks for the PyCon talk link :-)
>