Re: Bug#153406: newbiedoc: odd doc-base location
On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 09:37:19AM +0200, Romain Lerallut wrote:
> Thus spake Steve M. Robbins on Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 10:16:48PM -0400:
> > Package: newbiedoc
> > Version: 0.5.0-3
> > Severity: normal
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I found the newbiedoc documents in the "doc" section of doc-base,
> > which is rather vague and generic. I'm not sure what to suggest
> > for a proper category, since the newbiedoc appears to be a little
> > of everything. Perhaps "admin" is the closest?
>
> I don't agree, there are strong precedents for the 'doc'
> section:
> sysadmin-guide
> doc-linux
> debian-guide
> ...
I didn't know about these. Without seeing them, I'd suggest that
"sysadmin-guide" belongs under "admin", and "debian-guide" belongs
under debian. I can't guess what "doc-linux" means.
> But I can see only 3 documentation packages in 'admin'
> (cfengine-doc, dpsyco-doc, harden-doc) and all of them are
> related to another package.
It is true that the Debian documentation system classification has
been a free-for-all. Six hundred developers each categorizing their
own package with no guidelines is a recipe for chaos. I expect that
many "oddities" exist. On the other hand, there is a lot of reason to
suspect that what one finds "odd", another finds "natural". Indeed,
there is really good reason to suspect that a strict hierarchical
classification system is doomed. See, e.g.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/bates/index.html
> As there is no subsection (admin/doc or doc/admin), I think it
> should stay there, with the more general ones. What do you
> think ?
I think the test is the following. Make sure dhelp is installed,
and fire up http://localhost/doc/HTML/ in your browser. Now,
pretend that you are a newbie looking for help. Which category
would you choose first? Second?
I personally find generic categories like "misc" or "doc" to be
worse than useless. I already *know* that I'm looking at the
collection of docs. I want categories that guide my exploration.
There has been some discussion about revamping the documentation
system about a year ago:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200108/msg00869.html
I think the last proposed classification was in:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200108/msg01022.html
and got general support.
Now, nothing has been implemented, basically due to a combination of
the then-immenent woody release and inertia. Now that woody has been
frozen, it would be nice to revive and finish the debate.
Thus my Cc to debian-devel.
In the light of that First Monday article (above), I've become
persuaded that documents should be allowed to live under multiple
classifications. How feasible is that? Does anyone here know what
Bates means by "faceted classification"?
Cheers,
-Steve
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