Documenting new features

From SambaWiki
Revision as of 05:22, 13 September 2018 by Timbeale (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

The best place to document Samba features is in the code itself, i.e. by writing great man-pages and samba-tool help. Writing a good WHATSNEW.txt description is also a great way to let existing Samba users know about a new feature. However, documenting new and updated features on the Samba wiki is also useful, and can be a helpful way for a new Samba user to work out what Samba can and cannot do.

Documenting user features

  • There's a template to help you get started. Just create a new page and save it with the following content:
{{subst:NewFeature}}
Through the magic of mediawiki templating, this will create a skeleton page.
Here's an example of what your finished page might look like.

This structure won't work in all cases, but try to use it as a guide so that wiki pages have a consistent look to users.

You may want to go into a lot more detail about the new feature, or have several different pages explaining different aspects of the feature. In which case, you could use the above template to provide a brief overview of the feature, and then simply link to the other pages to drill-down in more detail.

Documenting other work

The above template won't make so much sense if you're working on something that's not really user-facing, e.g. Python-3, WAF, selftest. However, if you've put in a lot of work on the changes, then it's still worth documenting it for other developers. Just use a free-form wiki page, but make sure to link to your new page from relevant places, e.g. Developer Documentation.