This page will describe how to write/modify/update documentation on this very website. Additional, discussion-oriented, documentation is done on the Rock wiki

The Rock website is automatically generated using webgen from Markdown files and uploaded to rock-robotics.org. The markdown files are stored in a git repository on github.

If you want to update the Rock reference documentation, i.e. the Rock website, you need first to check it out. From within a Rock installation, this can be done with

aup base/doc

The documentation is flavored, i.e. there is one branch for master, one branch for next and one branch for stable. Make sure you edit the “right” branch. The guideline is that anything that applies to stable should be done on the stable branch as it is what new rock users see in the first place.

If you need to switch the branch (as, for instance, to edit the ‘stable’ documentation even though you are using the master flavor), just do

git checkout -b stable autobuild/stable

The markdown file for e.g. documentation/orogen/index.html in src/documentation/orogen/index.page.

Once you have done your modifications, run webgen once to be able to preview them:

rake

This will generate the HTML code in the base/doc/out/ directory. Simply open base/doc/out/index.html with a web browser to see the generated website. Once you are happy with your changes, commit them to git.

You then will propose your changes to the Rock developers … and get their thanks !

Finally, we are keen on improving the Rock documentation. Getting commit rights on the Rock documentation repository is as easy as dropping an email to the rock-dev mailing list.