From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Fri Mar  5 03:05:09 1999
Subject: Extensible documentation
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Thomas Hoffmann <hoffmann at ehmgs2 dot et dot tu-dresden dot de>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 03:03:39 -0600 (CST)

On  5-Mar-1999, Thomas Hoffmann <hoffmann at ehmgs2 dot et dot tu-dresden dot de> wrote:

| As I read about extensions of Octave's m-file basis I remembered
| a problem that I often have when trying to do something new with
| Octave: Although there is documentation of Octave's core functions, 
| the great amount of contributed m-files is (naturally) not included
| and I have to dig into the m-file directories, armed with grep and
| some wild guesses how the function I look for could be named.
| 
| Is there any interest to reason about a possible framework
| of documentation for contributed code, e.g. to be able to extend stepwise
| an .info file for "Octave contributions"? 

How do you see this working?

For a manual to be really useful, I think it needs to be more than
just a `laundry list' of documentation for individual functions, so
the additional info files would still need to be written and
maintained separately from the doc strings that are present in the
functions.

It has always been possible to add documentation to an existing
directory of Info files.  If you write Texinfo documentation for
your code, a pointer for it can added to the info directory file.

jwe