On a project you need to nail down what you want to do first. I mean that you need to write the spec. But how do you share your spec or the documentation of a project? You can have many contributors to a documentation, you want to keep it up-to-date and you want the documentation accessible.
I like to keep every parts of a project has close as possible. So I wanted to put the documentation in our source code management system. The idea was if you were to modify or create a module in the application you can go ahead (you should) and adjust the doc at the same time. What a clever idea! What a headache when my co-workers and I tried to modify the same Open Office document at the same time. We are now dealing with some annoying binary conflicts! We don’t know how to get by those easily! We must found a painless way to do that.
I observed many open source projects and I found that they writing there documentation mostly in HTML. I like this idea cause it is very easy to put the doc online and the source code management system do a great job to merge the changes that we do to the spec (it’s just some code anyway). I found it simple enough and I feel that anyone on the project can write a little bit of HTML.
I will give it a try.
How do you share the documentation of your projects?
