Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Reorient docs toward a task-based structure #19211

Open
1 task done
colindean opened this issue Feb 3, 2025 · 3 comments
Open
1 task done

Reorient docs toward a task-based structure #19211

colindean opened this issue Feb 3, 2025 · 3 comments
Labels
features New features

Comments

@colindean
Copy link
Contributor

Verification

Provide a detailed description of the proposed feature

The Docs track of the AGM agreed on an observation that many of our docs could be reorganized to prioritize objective task completion instead of often lengthy system or operations descriptions.

Contrived examples, totally not intended to be actually used:

Current: System/ops description Proposed: Task-oriented title
Taps
  • Create and manage collections of Formulae and Casks with Taps
  • Hosting a third-party repository for Taps
brew livecheck
  • Implementing an effective livecheck
  • Choose a livecheck strategy

This would be a large body of work and may necessitate breaking up large documents and ensuring there is a table of contents on some pages.

What is the motivation for the feature?

While seasoned maintainers may know exactly where look for help on a subject having seen it in the docs before and needing a refresher, folks new to the docs or infrequent users may benefit from a browsable structure that presents a selection of common tasks, perhaps collected by area.

How will the feature be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users?

All maintainers benefit from clear documentation, and most users looking for help would benefit from a more browseable set of titles and headers that are more likely to align with their current task.

What alternatives to the feature have been considered?

We may be outgrowing our current documentation system, but this work should not yet necessitate such a move.

@colindean colindean added the features New features label Feb 3, 2025
@alebcay
Copy link
Member

alebcay commented Feb 3, 2025

Reminds me of https://diataxis.fr/. TLDR:

  • Tutorials (learning-oriented practical activity)
  • How-to guides (goal-oriented directions which guide through a problem or towards a result)
    • Lots of (outdated) third-party video and blog material out there in this area
  • Reference guides (information-oriented technical descriptions of mechanisms and operation)
    • RubyDoc
    • Formula Cookbook leans somewhat in this direction
  • Explanation (understanding-oriented discursive treatment of a subject)
    • Whitepapers, blog posts, etc.

Not all four quadrants necessarily make sense in Homebrew's context, but I think it's a useful framework for thinking about what kind of docs there could be.

@colindean
Copy link
Contributor Author

Diataxis is an inspiration!

@MikeMcQuaid
Copy link
Member

Good idea!

Taps

  • Create and manage collections of Formulae and Casks with Taps
  • Hosting a third-party repository for Taps

If we do a rename like this: let's try really hard to ensure we have redirects to not break existing links.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
features New features
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants