We’ve finally settled on a new place to house all our various technical documentation for both package consumers and package creators.

http://bincrafters.readthedocs.io/en/latest

ReadTheDocs.org

After battling a bit with the scaleability issues of the Github wiki, and then various documents inside a github repository, we realized the answer had been in front of us all along. The documentation platform for Conan.io has been very stable and effective for us, and the integration with Github enabled all of us to make various contributions and corrections via GIT (the most effective known mechanism for this kind of collaboration). So, obviously we signed up for the same platform for Bincrafters.

Status

At the time of this writing, the documentation is still very immature (we know, we’re sorry). We’ve basically just pulled together content from our blog, Trello, Github issues, and our early Wiki pages. Most of it has not been thoroughly proofread, and most tutorials or procedures have not been carefully walked through. Also, at this time we are working on updating a large number of recipe’s and CI files for existing packages so the documentation is not quite the top priority. Hopefully, some of our new users and contributors will find it easy and beneficial to add or improve content as they try to use it.

Contributing

The great part about Readthedocs and Github is that they enable users to suggest changes via PR, and without even needing to clone the repository to their local machine. When you click the “Edit on Github” button, Github is smart enough to assume you need to fork the repository, and that your changes in the web interface need to be submitted as a PR. The whole workflow is streamlined, so hopefully everyone finds this to be convenient enough to be worth the effort. Of course, most consumers of OSS resources WANT to help, it’s most often just a matter of how high the barriers are to entry. With Readthedocs and Github, we feel that the barrier is as low as it can be with current technology.

Thanks

Thanks to both Github and Readthedocs for their unbelievable free services, and thanks to all our past, present, and future contributors.