What is good polish in a library for people to use...

# library-development

[joseph_ivie]

What is good polish in a library for people to use? Unit tests, docs, coverage, markers, publication, anything else?
We have internal stuff, but the transition from internal to public is a struggle for me. I'm still figuring out how to bridge the gaps.

[mbonnin]

docs and samples are super important

[mbonnin]

For better or worse, no one finds the unit tests (despite the fact that they can be pretty good sample code)

[mbonnin]

coverage is mainly for maintainers

[mbonnin]

To me it boils down to: getting started, guides, sample app, api reference (Kdoc)

[mbonnin]

If your lib runs on the web, a live demo is also good

[joseph_ivie]

Thanks! Yeah, for me it usually comes down to the simple sample on the front of the readme, a screenshot, and the live demo.
Never look at kdocs these days myself though - I just go to source since the docs are in the comments there anyways, but I'm probably weird that way

[mbonnin]

I'm the same when coding.
KDocs are useful to link in discussions and/or to reference older versions of the symbols

[mbonnin]

The KDocs comment are important and once you have them, publishing them is quite easy

[mbonnin]

So it's a nice bonus but yea, not the most important thing IMO

[joseph_ivie]

Fair enough - I set up kdocs initially but it took up the vast majority of the build process and took a shocking amount of ram at the time. I'll have to go back and figure that out.

[mbonnin]

It is definitely slow and resource heavy

[mbonnin]

I only run it from CI so I don't mind too much though

[russhwolf]

Consider enabling the binary compatibility verifier. It's not perfect but it's a good check that you're not exposing anything you don't mean to, and that you're not breaking any existing usage by accident

[joseph_ivie]

Yeah, I'd better do that in this transition. I've only been keeping source compatibility for the most part and that's gonna have to change.

[CLOVIS]

Publishing KDocs can be a good way to give visibility to the library, as it increases the number of results on Google when searching for it 😅