On 2014-09-04 17:00 -0400, Shawn H Corey wrote: > On Thu, 4 Sep 2014 16:33:13 -0400 > Nick Bowler <nbowler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Can you be more constructive? I think Autoconf and Automake have > > rather good manuals[1][2]. Why are they crappy? How can we make > > them better? > > > > [1] https://gnu.org/s/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html > > [2] https://gnu.org/s/automake/manual/automake.html > > When was the last time you read completely through those manuals? > There's too much information all at once. I have never read the manuals cover-to-cover. But by now I have probably read most, if not all of the material in them over the course of ~10 years. But this puts me in a bad position to critique the manual from the perspective of newbies: as I know Autoconf rather well I am unlikely to notice if some details are missing from the manual. > And I didn't say the manuals were bad. It's that the documentation is > too dense and not organized for learning. In other words, crappy. Sorry, I am having a hard time reconciling these two statements. > It took me two days to find the diagram on my blog from Wikipedia. It > should have been one of the first things I searched for. Similar diagrams are found at the very beginning of chapter 3 ("Making configure scripts") of the Autoconf manual. Would changing them or perhaps adding another diagram here improve the manual? Thanks, -- Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/) _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
