On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 12:44:08AM -0700, Jan S. wrote:
folks have generated documentation outside of the project (no problem
with that), however, since it’s not in our repository, we can’t edit
it to make corrections, extensions, etc. Besides Naveens’s, we’ve got
the same problem with Dawei Shen’s tutorial.
Any chance that the authors of this external documentation might be
talked into contributing it to the docs module?
Looks like we’re making progress in that direction 
land here, and getting more people playing with this stuff would make a
big difference.
Agreed.
With regard to Windows, unless some Windows programmers step up to do
the work, I don’t think we’ll ever end up very polished on that
platform. Martin and Stephane have done good work getting it to work
under MinGW and Cygwin, but neither of them are windows users. [We
could be seeing a cultural difference here. Folks from the free
software world understand that software gets written by people, not by
some abstract “company” located someplace else. If the hypothetical
GNU Radio windows users keep waiting for somebody else to do it, it’ll
most likely never get done.]
- Commented/documented examples
- The secret gnuradio-core library docs as HTML (or CHM on Windows)
Sounds reasonable. I think I’d consider this the minimum set:
gnuradio-core, gnuradio-examples, gr-audio-, usrp,
gr-usrp, gr-wxgui
regardless of whether they had a usrp or not. I expect that at some
point in the future we’ll have a gr-pyqtgui, and then we’ll see how the
two GUI options compare.
Basically, documentation for anything that you can do without a C++
compiler, with a focus on How-Tos, examples and ideas for experiments.
Seems reasonable.
Does this make sense? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here? If so, any
other ideas on where to focus?
Also, does this hypothetical binary distribution exist, or is somebody
maybe working on it?
I’m not aware of anyone currently working on a .rpm distribution.
Ramakrishnan has been generating Debian .debs for the past few years.
I’d love to have .rpms, if somebody is willing to generate and test
the .spec files on say, SuSE 10.*, Fedora Core 5, and perhaps Mandriva
200{6,7}
I haven’t used docbook, but it doesn’t exactly look like rocket science.
Any recommendations on authoring tools? (Please, let the answer not be
“Emacs, of course!”). Vex looked pretty promising, OpenOffice didn’t
seem to offer much support.
Actually, I think that most people use emacs, of course 
There are a couple of docbook modes to choose from…
I’d definitely stay away from using OpenOffice to generate docbook.
I’m not familiar with Vex, let us know how it works out.
Cheers,
Jan
Thanks again for all your input and ideas.
Eric