Writing documentation

For the people that knew this was coming, I'm splitting out the documentation on the tracker into bundles. I tried to keep it organized so that each bundle should be about as much work as the others. So far I have the frameworks split up and I'll be splitting up the protocols and other various documentation needy bits soon.

Jon and I talked this afternoon and we decided that the right thing to do right now is just to write a very short blurb in the summary comment section (the ##! comments at the top) then make sure that everything in the export section is documented. That includes each field in record definitions, exported function prototypes, and configuration variables.

In normal ## documentation comments, the first sentence is also special and is used as a summary somewhere. Jon, could you provide an actual explanation of what the first sentence is used for? I don't think I'm qualified to do it. :slight_smile:

Anyway, you should be able to claim tickets in the tracker by assigning them to yourself. If anyone that isn't listed as a developer on the tracker would like to get all masochistic and help out with documentation, get in touch with me and we'll work something out.

Direct links to the current documentation bundles:
  http://tracker.bro-ids.org/bro/ticket/706
  http://tracker.bro-ids.org/bro/ticket/707
  http://tracker.bro-ids.org/bro/ticket/708
  http://tracker.bro-ids.org/bro/ticket/709

  .Seth

In normal ## documentation comments, the first sentence is also special and is used as a summary somewhere. Jon, could you provide an actual explanation of what the first sentence is used for? I don't think I'm qualified to do it. :slight_smile:

It's used in the Overview->Summary section of each script's documentation to give a short description of each Bro identifier that's being documented. e.g. see:

http://www.bro-ids.org/documentation-git/scripts/base/protocols/ssl/main.html#summary

which has a brief description of SSL::root_certs and then the more verbose docs for it are further down:

http://www.bro-ids.org/documentation-git/scripts/base/protocols/ssl/main.html#id-SSL::root_certs

+Jon