From BlenderWiki

About me

Kdawg is also known as Kevin to some. Kdawg was a silly nickname he acquired while in the Navy, and he liked that better than some of the other things he was called in those days.

Kdawg doesn't actually refer to himself in the third person, but sometimes gets in that kind of mood. He's been programming since the days his father brought home a Vic-20, and learned BASIC the way most people learn their primary spoken language, by typing in programs for the Commodore-64 from a magazine called "Compute's Gazette!"

Kdawg is currently trying to get the Blender developer documentation up to date, so that new devs aren't completely frustrated and quit before they start.

Blender Dev Docs structure proposal

The following is a proposal for restructuring the developer's wiki to make it flow better, and reduce the barrier of entry for new developers, as well as reduce the redundancy of much of the documentation:

• New developer info (use existing page - Dev:Doc/New_Developer_Info)
• Building Blender (new)
  • Decide which platform to build on (new)
  • Install Git and download the source (new)
  • Download the dependency libraries (new)
  • Prepare the build system (new)
  • Build (new)
• Code Style (use existing page - Dev:Doc/Code_Style)
  • IDE Configuration (use existing pages in this section if they exist, otherwise create them - Dev:Doc/IDE_Configuration)
    • Eclipse
    • KDevelop
    • NetBeans
    • QtCreator
    • Code::Blocks
    • XCode
    • MS Visual Studio Pro 2013
    • MS Visual Studio Express 2013
  • Architecture overview (new)
• Process (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process)
  • Bug Reports (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Bug_Reports)
  • Contributing Code (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Contributing_Code)
  • Committing (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Commit_Rights)
  • Release Cycle (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Release_Cycle)
    • Release Checklist (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Release_Checklist)
• Other ways to contribute (new page)
  • Addons (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Addons)
  • Translate Blender (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Translate_Blender)
  • Wiki maintenance (new page)
• Code History (use existing page, but badly needs update - Dev:Doc/Process/Code_History)
• Module Owners (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/Process/Module_Owners)
• Frequently Asked Questions (use existing pages - Dev:Doc/FAQ)

The main issue I see is that each system has it's own page, even though 90% of the installation steps are identical between each one. This attempts to simplify that, and give a general overview of the process from a high-level, with OS specific instructions where necessary. Hopefully by using this arrangement of pages, someone would also be able to follow these steps and set up a build system on anything (FreeBSD, Arm, etc). In addition, there are no less than 3 places that IDE Configuration is talked about, as one example. This kind of duplication of information almost guarantees that information will become stale. Also in this revision I would drop all references to MSVC 2008, as moving forward 2013 is available. 2008 references can be included in general Windows environment discussions.

To keep this specific order in the custom js menu on the left, will we need to add section numbers?