Documentation and Development Guides

[PeachesMLG]

I think there is a big issue within Jellyfin around knowledge sharing and development, as a new developer coming into Jellyfin its very hard to know what the code does and where it does it. The only real way to to get awnsers to alot of stuff is to ask somone in the development channel, and there is a big issue where if a developer leaves the jellyfin project there are sections of code no one knows how it works (e.g. sync play)

Id like to propose a way to document some features e.g. (and whatever anyone else can think of)

• SyncPlay
• Transcoding
• Libraries
• Authentication
• Websockets connections

Within each feature it would be nice to add some of the following:

• Mermaid diagram of the general flow of code (within both backend and frontend) https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-files-mermaid/
• Key directories of where the code is located
• Maybe some faq's on how the code works?

My proposal would be a docs folder inside this repo where we can store this thing (aswell as a link to that documentation in the ReadMe.md of the jellyfin and jellyfin-web repos)
Then this folder can be structured like docs/features/syncplay/diagram.md docs/features/syncplay/faq.md

Id also like to note, that I am in no way proposing we document everything in one PR, with things like this its easy to think that its going to be very big and not even bother starting, but if we can do small commits and document each section bit by bit, I think it would massively help any new developers wanting to contribute.

If there are any sections / documentation you think I havent added or if you feel like an alternate system of documenting this would be better id be interested in any thoughts.

If interested I can also raise an example PR of how this would look

[PeachesMLG]

So I started creating a mockup of this in Mermaid and its getting very messy

I think having diagrams is a good idea, but we need to get the correct level of details for them where its simple and easy to understand, let me do some research into other options for this.

But I think our Diagrams need to be

• Easy to understand
• Have a good level of detail in them
• Easily editable by anyone

[PeachesMLG]

Miro looks a lot better, but its going to be way harder to edit/maintain