Open adamgayoso opened 1 year ago
Just seeing this now, but I'd broadly agree with this.
During the hackathon I had a good conversation with @emdann around our docs for package development. I think the perspective of coming from R to python was really good to get, since it pointed out many things I take for granted. A lot of the topics covered were more on the more practical side (e.g. what file do dependencies go in, how do you add docs for an argument) vs. abstract (e.g. how do you choose dependencies, how do you design an api). I've included my notes below, but the action items focussed on how the docs for working on a package could be improved.
The feedback was on the template documentation and scanpy developer guide.
I think better docs here also addresses the "never going mainstream" issue, but more on the "if the tests aren't running regularly, they're probably gonna fail" side of things.
During the conversation, I believe the bioconductor developer documentation was spoken highly of.
Some issues spawned from this discussion include:
Thinking of how we could have a collection of "docs for developers" and how that would be organized (maybe with Diátaxis):
Aside: While I want to have a conversation about better developer documentation, I'm not sure the scverse tutorials site is the right place for them to be presented.
The proposed developer docs structure looks great to me. Potentially additions to the "Explanation" section could be
Happy to help on this if needed!
There are often very non-obvious, but simple things that sometimes prevent ecosystem packages from "going mainstream". We should write a tutorial/guide on do's and don't's for building ecosystem packages.
I'm thinking here we can promote our template, but also make recommendations about requirements (don't pin versions, generally don't add unnecessary dependencies, etc etc), and some commentary on APIs.