M. Fioretti wrote:
On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 22:18:23 PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
There is a problem peculiar to the free/open source world in that
poor quality versions of things have no reason to ever go away.
That takes
Which actually isn't a problem but a feature.
with source code, yes, that's a blessing, no question. With bad
documentation, which is the only thing we were discussing (*), no.
(*) me, at least. Les actually diverged a bit throwing software
itself, rather than its documentation, in the picture.
I tried to separate the concepts of end-user documentation for the
things that end users should need to know (like using interactive office
programs to create your own content) from things related to program
setup and configuration. For the latter, people should only need to
know what it takes to make them work. If you can ship something that
works the way the user wants it to work, they don't need documentation
any more than they need the source code (...the real documentation at
that level). If you don't understand how these are intertwined, consider
how almost any variable could be left in the source or extrapolated into
a config file - and in the case of interpreted programs like perl or
shell scripts the configuration may in fact be a piece of the software
itself, sourced at runtime. The 'one-size-fits-all' concept of the
distribution RPMs doesn't quite work to provide configurations that
'just work' for everyone, but a few dozen canned configs might cover
most of the cases.
This is, of course, a different issue than 'how do I connect a form in
openoffice to a table in postgresql?'.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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