Lately we have decided in Bunian to move on to NHibernate 2.0, and the contributor assigned to the move started out, only to send an email one day after: “THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION!’.
We had errors as a result to the move which couldn’t be fixed without a documentation explaining why this happened.
After searching for a while, we found two resources of the new documentation:
- a wiki help that is hosted on Google Knol:
http://knol.google.com/k/fabio-maulo/-/1nr4enxv3dpeq/21#
Not really appealing to be used extensively; no smooth flow between chapters, frames dazzle the eyes, no table of contents, but surely a great step forward for a documentation that is maintained by the community - and online ordinary documentation as HTML:
http://www.nhforge.org/doc/nh/en/index.html
which is my preferred way for documentation (or at least until the wiki proves its usability)
Neither links were included anywhere in the NHibernate zipped file.
I didn’t realize how important a documentation is until it stopped us from moving on in our project; Only after we made sure that the documentation is available we decided to move on to version 2.0. The lesson to be learned is that if you are an enthusiast developer and want to add another piece of code to the world, keep in mind that your project is not only code; it is people, resources, community, ease of use, documentation, and any other simple thing that people need while you think it’s not important.
Of course I couldn’t find developers or contributors to open source projects greater than the NHibernate team, having such a project in the first place is awesome, and I thank each and everyone of them. I hope one day I can really contribute back to NHibernate. Thanks again guys.