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How does the community feel about resource requests?
How does the community feel about resource requests?
For example: I have been working on a project recently. By which I mean: mostly stumbling through by trial-and-error. The particular open source product I have been using appears to be poorly-documented beyond setting up a Maven extension project. Documentation for how to write code to do various tasks is very sparse.
I think a productive question to ask would be specific and include details, such as "what are the extension points to perform this task I need to accomplish?" along with details about the task. Or, "which classes and constants contained in the project are relevant to the task?" However, ideally, there would be some tutorial or guide that (so far) is just outside the reach of Google that has eluded me thus far.
Anyway, I understand questions like this are very unwelcome over there and I wish not to make a negative contribution if this community feels the same way.
3 answers
I think these kinds of questions are fine, but I am just one person.
open source product I have been using appears to be poorly-documented is an extremely common problem. I have actually seen the problem even on some paid products. So searching for help that should be in a project's documentation is not unusual at all.
A lot depends on the way questions are asked. But asked in a reasonable way, and showing attempts at prior research, such questions can be quite appropriate.
A different thing, which may or may not happen here, is the possibility of people creating documentation of projects or technologies, how-to guides or other types of articles that would be of help to lots of people. There are many other places on the internet for such things, but linking them together with relevant Q&A is something being considered as part of Codidact, along with other things a little different from "just another Q&A system".
I would like to see questions asking for help finding resources be considered on topic, but I would suggest creating a seperate category for them, like how Photography and Outdoors have one for Gear Reccomendations.
We should also think about some community wiki style posts with links to tutorials or books.
The article idea sounds good too.
These are fine, IMO:
- Here is my specification of what the program should do /--/. I'm stuck at x, (optionally: here is my code), where do I go from here?
- Is this implementation of x (code follows) fine in terms of parameters y and z? Where parameters could be execution speed, memory use, readability, portability, libraries/APIs used etc etc.
- Similarly, what tools/libraries are suitable given a certain specification.
- Can someone explain how this open source code works or how the person who wrote it were thinking? (code follows) Assuming I know fundamental stuff such as the programming language used in the code.
- Requests for general design or code review may or may not be OK, no consensus reached so far.
These are not OK:
- Write code for me requests. Very rude. Should lead to user suspensions.
- I'm working in a crappily documented hobbyist project where we have no specification, coding standards or documentation but just merrily hack away. Now everything is a complete mess, help!
- I don't understand anything about this code, including the basics of the programming language used. Can someone explain everything to me, so I don't need to study programming.
- What's best... without specifying the "best" criteria.
- Where can I find the manual/documentation for x?
- Where can I find study material?
- Where can I find or download libraries or code?
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