may I ask for proper docs?

[Thomas Adams <tadams@pobox.com>]

This is an open letter to the Debian developers:

It's a great distribution, I like it a lot, I'm installing it at school 
whereever I can and even think about packaging something myself. You sure do a 
hell of a good job.

But there is something which annoys me every now and then: Some maintainers do 
not put proper documentation into the debs which makes it hard if not 
impossible to install/configure software if you aren't an expert.

Some examples from hamm, which I installed 3 days after the CD images could be 
downloaded:

+ ISDN4LINUX: Includes a lot of documentation but the Debian style of 
  configuring it differs so much it's almost useless. After a lot of tinkering 
  I could connect to my ISP but if I'm honest, I neither know why nor could I 
  help somebody else to get online with I4L. I hope this will change some time 
  in the near future.

+ CNEWS: The maintainer doesn't like people without X or a printer it seems. 
  Absolutely no plain ASCII docs are available :-(. I filed a bug report but 
  never got a reply.

+ UUCP: The information is there but it differs from the actual build in at 
  least one point: Put a "commands ALL" into your sys file and wait for an 
  rgsmtp or however you call the command for compressed mailbatches. It won't 
  be executed unless you explicitly put the command's name into the sys file. 
  Either the documentation or the software itself should be changed. I filed a 
  bug report but never got a reply.

Please, look at the docs you're providing and if they can't be viewed by 
everybody, differ from the software because you changed something or aren't of 
much use to people who didn't grow up with Debian, then change them. It would 
make it so much easier to install the system.

Thank you,

Thomas