Re: goddammit
On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 03:35:57PM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 05:19:12PM +0100, Wim De Smet wrote:
> > On 2/2/07, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> > >On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 01:59:30PM +0100, Wim De Smet wrote:
> > >> On 2/2/07, Incoming <s.clement@cashette.com> wrote:
> More like vividly expressed frustration. After all, he didn't say
> anyone was an idiot, or accuse anyone of using Spongebob to soak up
> left-over baby's blood, did he?
>
> > >
> > >The trouble with Debian is that is is an old distro, and some of its
> > >documentation has become seriously out-of-date. If there was some way
> > >of maintaining the documentation along with the code, that would be
> > >great!
>
> Young distros haven't had time to let their docs get out of date -- they
> either don't have any or have wrong docs from other distros.
>
> >
> > I second that. The docs on the site are somewhat out of date. The
> > stuff in /usr/share/doc is usually up to date though, so is the
> > install guide.
>
> I think there's an interesting research project here -- how to keep
> documentation up-to-date in a volunteer organisation. Or in any
> organisation for that matter. Developers seem unable or disinclined to
> do so. This leads to documentation specialists, but unless they also
> develop, they won't have the information they need to write into the
> docs. In commercial software houses, where a manual is required, one
> ends up with neat documentation that is of very little value.
>
> Now the Linux documentation has escaped most of this, but it is not
> complete, and not up-to-date.
>
> Time to brainstorm, I suspect. Any ideas (like dependency tracking,
> maybe) how to at least identify what documentation is outdated? If we
> can't do at lest that, we're doomed.
>
Hi Hendrik,
There's a parallel thread on the same basic topic.
I think the biggest hurdle is the initial learning curve for people new
to *N*X coming to Debian (don't know about other distros). I describe
it as a brick wall.
More experienced users know whats up and where to turn.
Long term: yes a smooth documetation system would be great.
Short term: Provide, proactively, an on-ramp over that brick wall.
I'd be happy to work on this with people.
Doug.
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