Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The linked Tour is part of the documentation, which at a glance looks extremely extensive. You mention some issues; are you saying these docs are too hard to discover and lacking a good-enough TOC or index ?



In addition to them being both of those things, they are also, so far as I can tell (which is incomplete because of the lack of an index), missing documentation for most functions. If you click through to some of the other documentation for parts of Oil, you'll see that they're mostly written in a "blog post" style, with the intent of giving a reader a brief tour of a couple of features, while leaving everything else completely undocumented.

For an example of good documentation, look at the docs for the Python OS module. [1] You'll see that every single function in the OS module is listed, on order, with clarifications on its usage, what values it returns, what arguments it needs, and gives clarifying examples where needed.

For a project that's much younger than Python (though by no means "new"), you don't expect quite as much. But to compare: the page documenting the command language 404s [2], the help file that I believe ships with osh documents a few commands but has huge missing gaps (and doesn't mention min and max at all) [3], and the page on strings has more of a theoretical discussion on strings than practical documentation and has major sections labeled "todo" [4].

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html

[2] https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/command-language...

[3] https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/osh-help.html

[4] https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/strings.html


Yeah the reference is supposed to be "OSH Help Topics" and "Oil Help Topics", which are linked from this page:

https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.9.1/doc/

They list everything concisely on one page. But the body of the docs is mostly not done.

https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.9.1/doc/osh-help-topics.h...

https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.9.1/doc/oil-help-topics.h...

The release/$VERSION/ page lists the docs that are done, while /release/$VERSION/doc/ has all docs, including ones in progress.

Anything that's in progress has a pink banner at the top.

I got help filling out all the OSH builtins last year, and can use more help.

----

The 404 is an error which I noted here 2 days ago, and will be fixed in the next release: https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/121540-oil-dis...

If you see any errors like that in 0.9.2 or later, please file a bug. Also send feedback about things you would like documented. (But some things simply aren't done enough to be documented, like the list of builtin functions.)




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: