Help Writing Bitten Documentation

Bitten distribution is accompanied by nice User Manual. You may see a plain reflection of it on Documentation/index.html pages. If you reading this then you already know that these pages are immutable, at least it is not possible to edit them from Wiki. It is because Trac is reading them directly from SVN repository using an [[Include()]] macro. Typical User Manual page source looks like this:

[[Title(Installation)]]
[[Include(trunk/doc/install.txt)]]

----
See also: [wiki:Documentation]

These wiki pages are created manually and set to read-only, updatable only by Bitten developers.

If you need to propose a change - you should be able to checkout docs from SVN, edit sources in reStructuredText format (similar to Wiki), rebuild them to see the result of your changes and attach the patch to a new ticket (or open a discussion on Bitten Mailing List).

Checkout

Just checkout Bitten. Usually trunk/​, but any recent tags/ or branches/ is usually also fine. For example:

svn checkout http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/bitten/trunk bitten-trunk

will download sources into a bitten-trunk directory.

Building Docs

Prerequisites:

1. docutils (usually installed by Trac development setup anyway)
2. epydoc

Build:

4. Run: python setup.py build_doc
5. Open doc/index.html in a browser to verify result

Making a change

Just edit *.txt files, which are in ​reStructuredText format and rerun python setup.py build_doc to get the edits into html. If you are ready, make a patch file:

svn diff > documentation.diff

Adding a new page

Things to remember when adding a new page to documentation:

1. Add the page to index.txt so that users can find the page.
2. Add the file to repository using text/x-rst set for svn:mime-type.
3. Test the file using setup.py build_doc before committing.
4. Make a Documentation/<newpage>.html wiki page following the [[Include]] macro pattern described above.

See also all open documentation tickets.