Re: The DDP and the LDP
Adam,
Comments are inserted after yours...
Regards,
Jor-el
"The triumph of libertarian anarchy is nearly (in historical terms) at
hand... *if* we can keep the Left from selling us into slavery and the
Right from blowing us up for, say, the next twenty years."
-- Eric Rayman, usenet guy, about nanotechnology
On 19 Aug 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> Jor-el <jorel@marvin.megadodo.umb> writes:
>
> > What is the relationship, if any between the Debian Documentation
> > project and the Linux Documentation Project? I know that the DDP handles
> > Debian specific documentation, but sometimes there is nothing Debian
> > specific to document about.
>
> What does this mean?
Take for instance, the SCSI-HOWTO that used to exist once upon a
time. My Redhat 4.2 system has this (last updated Aug '96). This HOWTO
seems to have disappeared into thin air thanks to noone maintaining it. I
think this is a loss, as there is / was some conceptual information in it
about SCSI systems in general - not pertaining to any distribution. This
HOWTO, however, is useless at the moment, unless you actually know
something about SCSI (I dont), since it talks about module support for
SCSI in the 1.2 and 1.3 kernels. The world has moved on quite a bit since
then, and this makes the information very dubious to a newbie - the
intended audience for the HOWTO.
Certainly, Debian would benefit from having this HOWTO updated,
but OTOH, there is very little / no Debian specific info in this.
>
> > Is there a formal link between the two projects?
>
> No, but there should be more cooperation.
>
> > Admittedly, having the want-to-be maintainers contact the LDP
> > would be the right thing to do. But Debian seems to have a lot more people
> > wanting to join it than the LDP, so maybe, we should because we could.
>
> I encourage people to contribute to the LDP. I read their mail lists
> every now and then -- they don't have our infrastructure yet but they
> were working on it (moving to standardized free licensing, CVS, etc.)
>
> As for formal relationship, there only needs to be good blood and good
> cooperation between the two groups.
>
> This is my firm belief:
>
> * Debian documentation should be *only* about matters Debian!
>
> * Any generic documentation should be handled by the LDP
>
> * Debian "bits" of LDP documentation could be contributed by us to
> the LDP, but in no circumstances should we fork, or divert
> documentation into "competing" efforts.
I think you are right in principle about this. The question is
whether reality will allow us to maintain this attitude. I answer
questions on the linux-newbie list, and I have noticed a disturbing trend
recently. Distributions are patching some basic Unix commands to have
different options. As a result, the advice you give a newbie may not be
valid if he / she is running a distribution that is different from yours.
An example would be the 'tar' command. There exists a distribution
(I forget which) which supplies a tar with a '-y' option. This is the
equivalent of the "standard" '-z' flag. with the difference that the bzip2
compress program is invoked instead of gzip. No such flag in Debian
(though both Debian and RedHat have the generic --use-compress-program
flag).
A worse example is the '-M' flag of man. Both, the RedHat 'man'
and the Debian one use this flag to mean the same thing. But the behaviour
is different. The Redhat 'man' requires a 'man<n>' directory tree in the
path pointed to.
Why should this bother us? Simply because there exists
documentation which talks about how to do things the commonly done way
(which like it or not, translates to (today) - the RedHat way). The
above examples were about the commands being different. The same
problem exists if the procedures are different. The newbie who tries
something the Redhat way on a Debian install is going to get a wrong
impression of the quality of a Debian system. While the argument can be
made that someone should read distribution specific documents to get help
on that distro, sometimes such docs are not available. Or maybe the help
was obtained via newsgroups / mailing lists. Or maybe the newbie just
didnt know the difference between distribution specific advice and
generic advice.
I am not advocating making Debian behave like RedHat. What I am
saying is that maybe Debian should put some effort into modifying existing
public documentation so that any distribution specific procedures are
clearly indicated to be distribution specific. And maybe even provide the
Debian way of doing things.
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