On January 1, 2017 4:47:39 PM "Peter.Stein" <peter.stein@comcast.net> wrote:
> I
actually had a bunch of comments, but suspected they would not be well
> received
Try us.
>
and thus tried to be diplomatic
I must have missed that. ;)
>
and
productive by suggesting a
> step-by-step HOWTO. It's needed, everyone knows what one is, and
> shouldn't be difficult to put together by the live-build experts. You
> wanted an improvement suggestion and I gave you a very "actionable"
one.
I know how many hundreds of
hours of my personal time went into the original document before I called
it quits and doubt your assessment of the ease of replacing the current
doc. Since it's "incomprehensible", it seems it all needs to be replaced
from scratch ... or was that hyperbole, perhaps?
> I'm always reluctant to get into these "improvement" discussions
because
> the fact of the matter is you open source folks don't take
constructive
> criticism very well and invariably end up copping an attitude - like
you
> are now. I've developed software professionally for 35 years and can
> state unequivocally that this documentation does not meet the
> "production grade" standard.
I am not "you open source folks". I'm a person with feelings, not a bundle of stereotypes. I'm particularly not impressed by you "pulling rank" by trotting out your "senior developer" status when I haven't seen a single line of code or sentence of doc contributed by you to this project. Show me the code (or doc).
>
I
hear what you're saying about limited
> resources and community efforts, but as the old saying goes
"the road to
> hell is paved with good intentions". At some point somewhat needs to
> step back, take a deep breath, and do an honest assessment to
determine
> what if any improvements are needed.
I was that someone. I did that assessment, and this is what, within a reasonable amount of time, I managed to accomplish to cut through the information-dense manual and try to guide any new user through getting oriented. I hope you've read it and tried at least this "crash course" outline. If you did, please tell me what you thought of it:
https://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/live-manual/stable/manual/html/live-manual.en.html#8
I know it's just a small thing, but it's what time and energy allowed in lieu of a more ambitious total rewrite, which I was painfully aware was needed, but lacked the resources to carry out.
But that day has come and gone. What's left of the team is just keeping this doc, and live-build itself on life support. The main thrust of development is now in live-wrapper. So my honest assessment is: live-manual is imperfect, but it's the doc we have. If it falls short of your expectations, it falls on you, the users who still care about it, to make it better, because it's not likely anyone else will. That's not "copping an attitude". That's just giving you my experienced opinion on the state of things.
>
Griping
from the user community
> should not be the impetus for change. That's my $.02. ;-)
So if you truly believe that, switch from griping to contributing!
Ben