On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 10:09:22PM -0300, Donald Teed wrote: > > However I am disappointed by the state of Debian documentation > compared to that of Gentoo. Me too. And I contribute a lot of documentation. Unfortunately, documentation writting is low priority for many Debian Developers. > > I discussed my view on how Gentoo has done a better job at > documenting things, on the Debian forum here: > http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=879&highlight= As for the comments in your post related to the release notes (wrong links) these are because of the Release Notes not being final yet and what you are seeing is a preview of them (that's why some links point to the incorrect place). As for the comments on the "beauty" and breadth of documentation in Gentoo vs. Debian's I do agree. In Debian we have some very strong, in depth and translated to many languages documents such as the Installation Manual, the Debian Reference or the Securing Debian Manual. However, there are many documents that need to "fill in" the place for new Debian users that have not left of the ground and are incomplete, unmaintained and untranslated. There are several things that make this happen: - few Debian Developers or Debian users are contributing to writing documentation - there are several hurdles related to writing documentation (getting CVS access, knowledge of debiandoc-sgml) - there is room for improvement to the SGML template used by Debian (and to the tools that generate the HTML/PDF documentation) to make attractive documentation and prevent formatting issues with it. For example, consider how examples are shown when converting from SGML to HTML (basicly, <pre> or similar wraps them, no control is done on width) or consider how tables can be written in our current style. So, as you can see, the DDP is in dire need. You could contribute with: - reviewing existing documentation - taking up an existing document and getting it off the ground - improving the tools used by the project to provide better documentation - develop new means of documentation writing (ala Wiki) for Debian to try to entice more people into writing inexistent documentation. Pick your favorite, work on it with the help of debian-doc and I'm sure many people will appreciate it. Regards Javier
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