Re: Linux is not for consumers!
On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 at 20:11 GMT, Richard Kimber penned:
>>
>> In many cases it will remain poor until people report what they found
>> confusing about it - it's sometimes hard to document something you
>> wrote in a way that somebody unfamiliar with it can understand.
>
> People do. Their confusion is evident in the posts to mailing lists
> for each app. Often questions go unanswered. It may be, of course,
> that the documentation people are silently perfecting their document
> taking these questions into account, but in the meantime people are
> confused. This is not true of all apps. Some are done very well
> indeed and the developers interact with users very well. But it is
> true of enough important areas (e.g. sound) that the original thesis
> of this thread is true.
>
A lot of times, people post very app-specific questions to, say, this
debian-user list. I've done this myself. Perhaps no one on this list
has the expertise required. If you have a question about mutt (that
doesn't involve installation through apt), you're probably best off
asking on the mutt mailing list. If you have a question about vim ...
etc.
I don't think it's fair to expect the debian maintainers to take
responsibility for the documentation of all of the software available
for debian, though they often do a remarkable job of it anyway. You
wouldn't call microsoft with an autocad user question, would you?
--
monique
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