This means doccelerator and my Tinderbox scraper that chucked stuff into a CouchDB for exposure by a modified bugzilla jetpack. Either couch went crazy or someone gave it a request that is ridiculously expensive to answer with a database the accumulated size of the tinderbox database. I’m not aware of any trivial ways to contend with the latter. Judging by the logs, it looks like 2 people other than myself used these services, so, my apologies to those cool, insightful, forward-looking individuals.
The specific services are probably not coming back. doccelerator is being subsumed into something else that better meets documentation needs and will be more fully baked, more on that soon. I got the impression at the summit that the tinderbox problem is in hand, or very close to someone’s hand; maybe one of those robot grabby-arm things is involved? My reviewboard with bugzilla hacks instance is sticking around for the time being, but I think wheels are turning elsewhere in Mozilla on that front too, so hopefully my install is mooted before it falls over.
Lest there be any doubt, all clicky services are provided on a self-interested basis… I am happy when they benefit others, but I do these things for the benefit of my own productivity/sanity and they are hosted using my own resources. (While I had higher hopes for doccelerator, the MoMo-resourced couchdb service provisioning never happened so doccelerator never got pushed public with nightly updates because of said clicky resource constraints.)
This is the first time I’ve heard of doccelerator, so I’m eager to to hear more about the “something better” that’s coming. Regarding the “round-trip doc comments from the wiki” strategy, have you see PyDocWeb for Python? (http://code.google.com/p/pydocweb/)
I had not seen PyDocWeb. It looks very nice. Python has been in a pretty good place from a documentation perspective for quite some time, and a web-editor front-end is just icing on the delicious cake!
The “something better” is more about a system for tutorial-style documentation with inline examples that are executed and can be edited and re-executed within the page. The motivating factor for my documentation is basically Jetpack for Thunderbird. The APIs are complex enough that a docstring REPL call-and-answer is insufficient to demonstrate the APIs successfully so it’s important to be able to embed HTML results in the document and nice to be able to intelligently hyperlink the JS source to the appropriate documentation.
After having re-surveyed the existing JS documentation field, the main alternative to “roll your own” was to use the approach being used by the Jetpack team, but they do not have a solution for the interactive/editable examples at this time.
Reference documentation is still important to me and my solution is able to do such things and will be able to interoperate, but I have no goal at world domination on that front.