Sailfish OS Documentation

Welcome to the Sailfish OS Docs source repo.

• Edit and contribute
  • Just the documentation
  • Changes to HTML (Jekyll template)
    • Preview via GitHub Pages
    • Preview on your desktop
    • Upstream just-the-docs status
  • Review guidelines
  • Common pitfalls
    • Tables
    • Escaping Markdown syntax
    • URLs
    • Syntax highlighting
    • Templates and forgotten ./precheckin.sh
    • Images
    • Redirects
• Feedback
• Credits

Edit and contribute

Just the documentation

Simply edit a chosen README.md file and preview the changes before creating a PR.

Match existing docs source style, study the code to e.g. see how images are uploaded and displayed.

IMPORTANT: please read about the common pitfalls.

Changes to HTML (Jekyll template)

If you would like to improve the website itself (style, layout, browser fix etc.), you should test your changes before creating a PR:

Preview via GitHub Pages

NOTE: this process becomes cumbersome, if you already have your GitHub Pages enabled for other purposes under yourusername.github.io.

Fork this repo, then go to Settings | Pages | Source and choose the master branch. After a short while, you will find a copy of the docs published under https://yourusername.github.io/docs.sailfishos.org. Unfortunately, stylesheets and javascript (for search bar) won't be available, and all links will point to the top-level of the domain, thus will become broken. You're welcome to use this as an exercise for you, reader, to fix all absolute links to relative, whilst examining existing efforts in the upstream repo.

If you don't have own GitHub Pages setup yet (under yourusername.github.io), then to fix all the above broken bits, rename your forked repo via Settings | Options | Repository name from docs.sailfishos.org to yourusername.github.io.

If you already have your own yourusername.github.io, the process becomes more involved:

• Method 1:
  • push the forked docs.sailfishos.org under a new branch of your yourusername.github.io
  • point to that new branch in Settings | Pages
• Method 2:
  • rename your yourusername.github.io to something else, e.g. renamed-yourusername-pages via Settings | Options | Repository name
  • create new branch from renamed-yourusername-pages's default branch (using branch drop-down box)
  • set it to be as default branch in Settings | Branches
  • delete old branch in https://github.com/yourusername/renamed-yourusername-pages/branches -- this way old GitHub Pages will get unpublished
  • delete the forked docs.sailfishos.org repo
  • re-fork it again from https://github.com/sailfishos/docs.sailfishos.org
  • rename the forked docs.sailfishos.org to yourusername.github.io via Settings | Options | Repository name

Then start making changes to the active website, and as soon as you push a commit, your published website will shortly update itself.

Once happy, create PR which will automatically point to https://github.com/sailfishos/docs.sailfishos.org.

Preview on your desktop

To build on your local machine, perform the following commands:

Ubuntu

sudo apt install git ruby-bundler ruby-dev gcc g++ make
sudo gem install bundler

Fedora

sudo dnf install git gcc g++ make ruby ruby-devel
gem install bundler

Clone docs and config, install and start jekyll site generator

git clone https://github.com/sailfishos/docs.sailfishos.org
cd docs.sailfishos.org/
./create-bundle.sh

Follow the same process for creating PRs as previously.

Upstream just-the-docs status

Unfortunately the Just the Docs upstream is inactive, we very much hope that the author brings it back to live (as it has thousands of forks).

Its state however is sufficiently feature complete, truly standing out from the crowd of Jekyll docs generators.

If you are fixing a substantial issue for the Sailfish OS docs template (such as replacing all absolute URLs with relative ones), please first check amongst open PRs upstream in case it has already been addressed.

Review guidelines

When you have been asked to review a pull request in this repository, please follow the following guidelines:

• Be polite and considerate
• Ensure that contributors understand that review comments are not intended to be a sign of lack of appreciation for the work they have done, but rather are intended to further improve the contribution
• Working with pull requests might seem daunting for first time contributors. Please guide them through the process - just asking them to fix errors might not be enough.
• Check that the proposed change fits the scope of the documentation: the purpose of the site is to document Sailfish OS, development of Sailfish OS and development of Sailfish Applications
• Check the list of common pitfalls.
• Check that the source style matches the rest of this repository, such as no hard text wrapping, how images are included etc.
• Check that Git commit message format matches the history of commits (e.g. no [context] or JB refs in the first line of the commit)
• Check that the contribution uses neutral but friendly tone of voice
• Check that topics are not duplicated - it is better to link to another page of the documentation
• Check that the used terminology is aligned with existing Sailfish OS products, websites and documentation unless there is a specific reason not to
• Verify that the contributor has signed the Contributor License Agreement. For new contributors you should see a message from CLAassistant, stating that all committers have signed the CLA. For old contributors, the signature is checked as part of the automated workflow - you should see message about it in the checks section.

Common pitfalls

<tags>

The following Markdown org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Connection.ring.tel.<ID> will be rendered as org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Connection.ring.tel., and the <ID> bit is lost on GitHub Pages.

To avoid, always escape correctly: org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Connection.ring.tel.\<ID\>.

Escaping Markdown syntax

Please escape Markdown symbols ([, _, * and similar) with a backslash, when intention is to actually show them, or place such word(s) within a code block if possible.

Otherwise if you write e.g. _service, Markdown will render it as service and everything thereafter will be shown in italic, whereas correct should be \_service so _service gets displayed as intended.

However, you don't have to escape some symbols (like an underscore), when they're in a middle of a word e.g. tar_git and Q&A are shown correctly.

Tables

• Markdown does not support header-less tables, so please come up with a name for each column, to avoid an empty row at the top.

• GitHub Pages does not render tables that have only one row, thus please come up with a header row for it too.

• Markdown doesn't support rowspan and colspan. The latter can be worked around by giving each column a more granular name.

  Instead of rowspan, use a ditto mark to show that a cell has the same content as the cell above: <center>"</center>.

  If you absolutely must defy the purpose of using Markdown, then it's possible to achieve rowspan colspan functionality by writing your tables in HTML inside an *.md file.

• Yes, we know that tables with long text in a cell look way too wide in Markdown's source, and cannot be rectified because it doesn't support line breaks in them. But if a cell is that big, maybe it shouldn't be a table in the first place? ;)

URLs

It's good practice to surround URLs: <http://some.url>. GitHub will linkify even non-surrounded ones, but some Markdown renderers don't. Thus please increase portability of these Markdown docs.

Syntax highlighting

• When using Markdown's syntax highlighter, you can find the list of Markdown supported syntax highlighters here.

• Most if not all will correctly appear in your GitHub web editor preview. However not all of them will be highlighted in GitHub Pages due to an unknown limitation.

  The following do not to work at the time of writing: gitattributes, qmake, specfile, ssh-config, wiki.

  The following are rendered/coloured incorrectly in Pages (but correct in GitHub editor preview): ini

• Shell script syntax highlighter has been disabled (simply by identifying a code block as nosh instead of sh) because it does more harm than good. E.g. it always highlights exec, but doesn't know that it shouldn't highlight when exec is an argument to sfdk.

Templates and forgotten ./precheckin.sh

If you are modifying a template (*.mdpp file), don't forget to run ./precheckin.sh before committing.

Images

There is helper style flex-images for adding images. You can use it as follows:

<div class="flex-images" markdown="1">

* <a href="example1.png"><img src="example1.png" alt="Example image 1"></a>
  <span class="md_figcaption">
    Example image 1
  </span>
</div>

If your image is narrow and tall, like device screenshots, you can use additional narrow-image style on the anchor tag.

<div class="flex-images" markdown="1">

* <a href="example2.png" class="narrow-image"><img src="example2.png" alt="Example narrow image"></a>
  <span class="md_figcaption">
    Example narrow image
  </span>
</div>

You can use the flex-images style to add two narrow images, e.g. device screenshots, on a single row. In this case you don't have to use the narrow-image style. The style will gracefully fall back to displaying the images on separate rows if there isn't enough space to display them on one row.

<div class="flex-images" markdown="1">

* <a href="example1.png"><img src="example1.png" alt="Example image 1"></a>
  <span class="md_figcaption">
    Example image 1
  </span>
* <a href="example2.png"><img src="example2.png" alt="Example image 2"></a>
  <span class="md_figcaption">
    Example image 2
  </span>
</div>

Redirects

Sometimes it is necessary to move a page to a new location. As we can't control all possible links to a page, it might be useful to provide a redirect from the old location to the new. This can be done by leaving a README.md in the old place, with the following line in the front matter:

redirect_to: /new_location

Feedback

Please create a report in the Issues section.

Credits

The following content generators are being used:

• Just the Docs
  • Nicely builds this whole website with navigation bar and mobile view
• Jekyll Pure Liquid Table of Contents
  • Generates table of contents by scanning all headings on a page
• Markdown Preprocessor (Markdown PP)
  • Used by ./precheckin.sh to include templates into L10n style guides