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Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:50:53 -0500
From: Peter Karman <peter@peknet.com>
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Subject: Re: [lucy-dev] Generalize Tutorial for multiple host languages

Marvin Humphrey wrote on 11/04/2010 06:30 PM:

> To eliminate these dependencies, I think the Tutorial should be simplified to
> build a command-line app, and the corpus should be changed to plain text.
> Every potential host language has basic file and directory manipulation
> capabilities; it should be possible to generalize the tutorial prose so that
> it can work with all of them without modification.

I favor the opposite. Instead of generalizing the tutorial, let's build
a tutorial for each language implementation.

The philosophy of Lucy is: provide core, shared, C code and idiomatic
language implementations. Let's follow the same philosophy for our
documentation: idiomatic tutorials per-language. It ought to be possible
to lift the example code out of the tutorial and run it; by avoiding any
particular language implementation, we prevent that ease-of-use.

> 
> Additionally, by eliminating those CPAN prerequisites entirely, we skirt the
> issue of dependency licensing.

How is documenting something, in a tutorial, affected by software
licensing? We don't distribute those modules.


-- 
Peter Karman  .  http://peknet.com/  .  peter@peknet.com