Open up the Help manual in Wiki format

[Danilo]

Welcome to the world of PureBasic!

[TI-994A]

...I dont like their business model...

After more than fifteen years in active development, I'd have to say that it's a pretty sound model.

It beats Microsoft's VB6 business model anytime.

[Shardik]

Actually PureBasic did already have an own wiki (in English and German): André Beer's PureWiki on PureArea
http://www.purearea.net/pb/english/sitemap.htm

But due to missing interest and the massive occurrence of spam bots (even destroying PureWiki's database), PureWiki never recovered:

Another bad information: the PureWiki is down since several weeks, too much spam-robots flooded the database. Don't know until now, what will happen with it in the future...

[freak]

Hey Danilo, lay off the booze a bit. You are in ranting mode again...

Wiki:
There were two attempts at doing exactly what is proposed in this thread. There was even one wiki hosted by Andre himself. General interest over the long run was minimal and contributions were pretty much non-existent. It was finally shut down after it was overrun by spam.

IDE:
The IDE was open source for quite a while. Again, actual contributions to the project were minimal. So we weighted the pro's against the con's and decided to not make the new IDE open. Btw, one primary reason why the new IDE is not open is because it is now tightly coupled with the compiler & debugger. So without the sources to that, its not that easy to develop the IDE. It is simply not a standalone program anymore.

As Danilo pointed out, PureBasic is a commercial product. We don't do things for charity, and when things don't make sense from that perspective we stop them. This is what any company does and has nothing to do with paranoia. Its called business sense. We don't maintain a documentation wiki that is riddled with spam if almost no serious contributions are made that benefit the overall documentation quality. We don't release the IDE source if all we have to deal with is people violating its license conditions and the product itself is only marginally improved.

Anyway, if you are serious about contributing to any of the above, you can still do. Just ask for access and you can help edit the documentation. A number of people do that already. The same goes for the IDE to a limited extend.

[IdeasVacuum]

It beats Microsoft's VB6 business model anytime.

[Fred]

Yes, "Feature Requests & Wishlists" is about dreaming. There are 4.500+ topics and 28.000+ posts in this category

If you were fair, you would have told than more than 800 were implemented:

http://www.purebasic.fr/english/search. ... mit=Search

Which is not not that bad.

[Vera]

Hi Keya,
I too don't think that a Wiki can become a solution as various attempts (not only areanet) in that direction didn't last long.

Things like these stand and fall with the initiator of such projects.
A wonderful example can be found on the french forum where one man cares about a more accurat & current PB-Help and re-shares it. Unfortunately it's not in english and only targeted to work for the WIN-OS-IDE. Still a great, privat support: [AIDE PUREBASIC] Mises à jour.


I wished there was at least one official uptodate documentation which would contain fixes and enhancement, applied when they are encountered / approved ... and not after years with the next pb-update.

Let me give you some examples:

A - bug-report: List.pb 404 - 11.09.14
After moving from LinkedList to List, the link to 'new' list.pb is still linkedlist.pb. After nearly a year it is still broken.

B - bug-report: [Done] Str() / StrU() - 09.08.14
Another corrupt linking within the help. Now here it says 'done'. But it isn't. (how do you like that?)

C - visit SpiderBasic and be interested in the very first link to its documentation.
From the very begining of this HP that prominent and very important link is broken and redirects to the official 'french' (???) PureBasic-HP.
Now at first there was no documentation, but in the meantime there is one. But even today that link is broken, and even though it had been reported on the forum. Besides that: in the forum it had never been announced that the docu was online and I only stumbled across it by chance.

You need to get used to bare many of those nuisances, forget about 'All OS' implying it would work for you. Search the forums or ask for a hundrets time and better take your own notes about important issues.

Maybe follow freak's offer to get access to the current help in progress and be one of the few members to have an uptodate help.

greets ~ Vera

[freak]

A wonderful example can be found on the french forum where one man cares about a more accurat & current PB-Help and re-shares it. Unfortunately it's not in english and only targeted to work for the WIN-OS-IDE. Still a great, privat support: [AIDE PUREBASIC] Mises à jour.

Everybody can build the up-to-date help file. The needed input files are available via Subversion here: svn://svn.purebasic.fr/home/svn/Documentation/v5.40
You can do a checkout of the repository and build the help yourself with the DocMaker included in every PB package (in the SDK folder).

Mesa is one of the people i mentioned above with write access to the documentation, and does a great job improving the french translation. If somebody is serious about helping, all you need to do is ask.

[Vera]

Hello freak,
w0w - that is really great that these docs are public
and I already had a long closer look ... got an idea how it's structured and already found the 3 new migration files are not yet among the german help ...

As of next I tried to figure out if the pbdocmaker would run on Linux - but still successless (I'll ask in a different thread).

If somebody is serious about helping, all you need to do is ask.

I've always been - I'll send a request

greets ~ Vera