Re: The reportmode report does not count the running clock

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Hi François,

pinard@iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> Hello, everybody.  Let me wish you all that the Year Started Well, and
> will continue that way all along!

Thanks!

> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Note that there is a million variables which are not referred to
>> in the manual - simply too many to mention them all.
>
> A million?  You *always* exaggerate! :-)

Well, I counted more than 1070 variables...  describing 5 of them 
per page would take 214 pages.  Not something I'd like to read :)

>> It might be useful to mentions this one, otherwise I would urge
>> restraint.  A good way to find unknown variables is described here:
>> http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-customize.html
>
> The manual should be reference, and should mention all variables.  A
> textual search in the manual should yield anything worth finding.

Emacs is The All-Mighty Self-Documenting Editor ;)

Wrt documentation, Emacs is its own reference, by letting you access
everything with C-h v org-*.

The manual is a secondary reference: one that contains the most useful
things to know about Org to use it efficiently.  It should cover 100% of
the core feature, and most of the rest -- but there is a trade-off in
this last area.  Between readability and completeness.

> However nicely and carefully the customization has been organized, one
> should ideally not have to guess and retry customize branches in hope of
> finding something, or peruse the sources, after having tried the manual.
>
> Do not misread me, I'm not at all saying that there is something wrong
> with the customization, or the availability of the sources! :-)

Another point: there is a lot to do to improve the current docstrings
and the manual.  This is a matter of 1) pulling from git, 2) modifying
the file, 3) run `C-x v =' in the buffer, 4) send the patch.

:)

> Maybe an appendix to the manual could be mechanically generated out of
> all customization information, with some Makefile/Emacs machinery for
> keeping it up-to-date?  Easier said than done, I know...  But I would
> like at least to throw the idea in the field.

This crossed my mind recently. 

See this file: http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/u/org.org
which presents all functions/options/variables from some org*el 
files.  

The code to produce this is here:
http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/u/org-lto.el

This is broken in many respect -- no cleanup is done on the 
docstring, and there is nearly no formatting.  Also, it does not
export well (see http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/u/org.html)

If you're interested in improving this, please go ahead, I'd be
interested in getting something working along these lines.

Best regards,

-- 
 Bastien