https://www.thinkulum.net/w/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Software_Development%2FProject_DocumentationSoftware Development/Project Documentation - Revision history2026-05-03T14:24:47ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.37.1https://www.thinkulum.net/w/index.php?title=Software_Development/Project_Documentation&diff=393&oldid=prevAndy Culbertson: Added the article.2019-02-22T05:48:06Z<p>Added the article.</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>READMEs give the reader a basic intro to your project, but at some point they'll need more extensive information. I'm calling this in-depth treatment the project documentation.<br />
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== Documentation generation ==<br />
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Some documentation is freeform writing, but using [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation_generator documentation generators] a lot of it can be collected from specialized comments and formatted automatically. You'd mainly use this to document your API. Sphinx is a popular Python tool for this purpose. It handles both types of documentation.<br />
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* [http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/ Sphinx]<br />
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My default Sphinx setup will be in my cookiecutter templates.<br />
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== Content ==<br />
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I didn't find many guides to writing user or developer guides beyond the README, so I may have to write my own at some point, based on an examination of well-documented projects. But here's one guide that covers some of the information developers will need:<br />
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* [https://www.ctl.io/developers/blog/post/how-to-document-a-project How to Document a Project - CenturyLink Cloud Developer Center]<br />
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One source of insight for documenters might be the content of man pages. Man (manual) pages are the documentation for Unix tools, and they have a fairly standard format.<br />
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* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page man page - Wikipedia]<br />
* [https://liw.fi/manpages/ Writing manual pages - Lars Wirzenius]<br />
* [http://www.schweikhardt.net/man_page_howto.html The Linux Man Page How-to - Jens Schweikhardt]<br />
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[[Category:Programming]]<br />
[[Category:Essays]]<br />
[[Category:Developing]]</div>Andy Culbertson