Re: Suggestion for Newbie Guide Lines (ITP)
* Michael Stenner <mstenner@phy.duke.edu> writes:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 1999 at 09:32:34AM +1000, Doug Young wrote:
>> Will someone PLEASE get the message that the present
>> format of MAN, HOWTO, and other stuff is NOT intelligible
>> to the majority of newbies, and that is why there are so many
>> postings on stuff regarded as trivial by experts !!!!!!!!!!!
Agreed, but we can help them finding the *good*, easy to understand
documentation. And we can also tell them how to ask for help in a way
that makes helping easy.
> seems the list is still interested. I suggest that those who would
> like to be involved in this more permanently let me know, and I'll
> start constructing a "mini-list" that we can fall back to when the
> interest dies down on debian-user.
Just Cc:´ing to the addresses would be enough, I think. Please include
me in this list.
> What do you think about:
> a) using html (this would help us -- we'd just mirror each other)
We still need an ASCII document that tells newbies about lynx or
Netscape in that case, IMO.
> b) having a table of contents and index ( <- index might be hard )
--------------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Not too much if the base is SGML or (La)TeX.
> c) trying to keep the documentation very short (ideally a page or
> less) and step by step, with links to more complete info.
This "very short documenation" should be in plain ASCII, IMO. It
should include links, of course, whereever they may lead.
I also think that the bigger newbie documentation you seem to have in
mind (judging from the TOC and index reference) is already written,
manyfold. We just need a "jump-station" to the best of them, put in a
prominent place (/etc/motd was my suggestion for a jump-station to
the jump-station).
Cheers,
Colin
--
Colin Marquardt <colin.marquardt@gmx.de>
Reply to: