Adding Alan Design Docs

[alan-if]

Adding Alan Design Docs

[tajmone]

Done: Added

The above mentioned docs are now available in the Beta7 branch, inside the xtra-docs/ folder (See Issue #48, commit 74fea67).

We now only need to decide:

• how these could/are going to be used, and
• whether they are eligible for merging into master branch.

IMO, it would be good to keep them here, to centralize development of any Alan-related docs and to free the Alan source repository from documentation work.

Ultimately, I chose xtra-docs/ as the folder name, instead of the initial proposal of alan-design/, for it seemed a better catch-all choice for a temporary folder that can host all sorts of incomplete documents. But of course, we can still change the name.

[thoni56]

I think alan-design is a good name. Only drawback I see is that it might be taken as an indication of final/true documentation. So provided that we clearly state the flux they are in, I'd suggest going for alan-design.

[tajmone]

Done!

Only drawback I see is that it might be taken as an indication of final/true documentation. So provided that we clearly state the flux they are in, I'd suggest going for alan-design.

I wouldn't worry about that, for all documents ready for consumption are clearly listed at the beginning of the main README.

Besides, once the Manual is officially ready for publication, we'll start to focus on deploying it on the Internet via GitHub Pages (from docs/ folder, or otherwise). So, ultimately, it should be clear that documents will be published online as they are ready, and that the repository hosts both WIP documents as well as ready-to-use ones.

But any improvements in the README to better clarify this division between ready and WIP documents are of course welcome.

[tajmone]

Merge Into Master?

Currently the Alan-Design docs are only available on the Beta7 dev branch (didn't want to create a new branch just for them), but if you're happy with them I could cherry-pick their commits (or just check out their folder from the dev branch into master) so they become available in master (not sure how long it will be before Beta7 gets merged into master).