Re: [boost] Why use Boost?

From: Andy Little (andy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-02 15:12:36

"David Maisonave"  wrote

> What's the point of creating a great class, if only a handfull of
> developers ues it, because the majority have no idea how to use it?

You cant escape the fact that writing documentation is the most tedious, rotten,
boring, miserable, mind-numbing job imaginable ***. Thats why so much
documentation is bad or non-existent. Thats why some library is "nearly
finished"  after even a couple of years "except for the documentation", which is
going to be started "very soon now"

OTOH you are absolutely right.  I think a lot of projects suffer or even die out
because they didnt tackle documentation. They just leave it too late.

BTW Quickbook:

http://www.boost.org/tools/quickbook/doc/html/index.html

 is great for simplifying the task of writing documentation, IF you can get over
the hurdle of installing all the myriad weird and wonderful dependencies. I have
no idea about DocBook or XML but I have found if I just copy someones  Quickbook
jamfile and do bjam --v2 in my doc directory, all my docs seems to get built)  I
think  the Quickbook documentation has been sparse too but looks like its being
fleshed out for boost_1_34_0.

***I'm doing documentation at the moment, so I know what I'm talking about  :-(

regards
Andy Little