[Scilab-users] How to patch a help page (Was: Re: What is a valid function name in Scilab?)

[Samuel Gougeon]

Le 16/04/2013 22:04, Antoine Monmayrant a écrit :
> Thanks for your answer.
> I found the 'help name', but as I said, the problem is two-fold: 1) 'help function' and 'help functions' are not pointing towards 'help name' in the description of a function name and 2), the error message is laconic and brings more confusion than clarification.
> I filled a bug report for the documentation ( http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12557 ) but I think I should fill another one for the error message.
>
> By the way, do you have any tutorial or example on how to propose a patch for the documentation?
> I'll be happy to propose something, but I really don't know where to start...
Yo may have a look here: http://wiki.scilab.org/Developers

The usual way is somewhat the following :

* xml files of help pages are released only among the source files of 
Scilab.
    you may download and unzip sources of the master. Updating your download
    once every 3 months should be enough.

* then, to identify the module related to a page, just have a look to 
the main
    section of the help where the page is homed. For example,
    help uiDumpTree
    lays into the GUI / Trees section / subsection of the help

* Go to the related SCI\modules\* directory in the sources
    For this example, * = gui

* Go to the \help subdir for this module
   Here you see one subdirectory per language. If you wish to edit the page
   in english, go to the en_US subdir. for the french release (if any): 
to the
   fr_FR subdir. And if you know russian, japanese or portuguese: to other
   related sub_dir.
   Each one may have subdirs. For this example, it is the case, since the
   "GUI" main chapter of the help has a "Trees" subsection. For each
   subsection of the help, there is a subdir in the help, for each language.

* Then, find the right xml page.  Here, the reference one in english is
    SCI\modules\gui\help\en_US\trees\uiDumpTree.xml

* Edit the page with your favorite xml editor. "Serna" was free for a 
long time
   but turned fully commercial in the past year. For my part, i am using 
now
   Notepad++, that has syntax highlighting, bracket matching and other 
facilities
   for xml files.

* Modify the file and store it in a ~Desktop\uiDumpTree\en_US\trees\*
    directory structure created from scratch. If you modify the file for 
several
    languages -- say also for fr_FR, avoid storing all files in the same 
dir:
    Sylvestre -- who processes files to the GIT if you do not do it 
yourself --
    prefers files distributed in languages subdirs, instead of 
processing renamed
    files such as uiDumpTree_en.xml, uiDumpTree_fr.xml, etc.

* Zip your ~Desktop\uiDumpTree\ dir into uiDumpTree.zip or whatever you want

* Send the zip to Sylvestre, or post it as attachment on the bugzilla 
related thread
    (if any) ; or claim for opening an account to the GIT/CodeReview to 
push yourself
   the files on the queue to be reviewed.

I may have forgoten some steps. Sylvestre will likely comment.

Regards
Samuel