Thursday, November 5, 2009

RapidSMS Docs Running Again

So, last night I finally fixed the rapidsms cron job - which had been offline for about 4 days -every since I updated the software that generates the documentation.

For the RapidSMS documentation we are using sphinx. If you google sphinx, you will come across a text search engine - this is not what we are using.

Why Sphinx?

Well, Django uses sphinx and RapidSMS is inspired by Django - so we decided to use Sphinx for RapidSMS. Sphinx is more like a documentation system than a documentation generator. It is quiet intensive to actually create the documentation. You need to write the tutorials and explicitly set the packages you want to generate documentation for. The autodoc generation from python packages is actually handled by a sphinx reference to docstrings.

So why use sphinx?? You have to learn a next markup (or markdown rather) syntax, and you need to type most the documentation anyway. Why not just use a wiki, or a blog, django, or latex :)

This is a good question?
There is something nice about the linking feature in sphinx - But I am not completely sold.

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