On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 07:32:24PM +0200, Daniel Egger <degger@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> book, see below) was anachronistic, more like a reference than a fluent
> style, every single part following the exactly same style like a
> manpage. We changed quite a lot and tried to enrich the content as much
References are extremely important, more important than tutorials in
prose, IMnsHO.
I think tutorials/introductions/verbose manuals/howtos are extremely
important to get people working, but for the actual work I very very much
prefer manpages, since when I ask for help on a specific item I want to
know about obscure settings, settings I didn't memorize, and a terse
manpage-like style is the one that gets the information across.
Now, maybe this can be combined, like a manpage-style reference + links to
usage examples (that would imho be optimal!), plus introductory
material.
Of course, whoever produces a sizable amount of help material decides on
the style, so the above just declares my preference in what I would clal
"useful".
I mean, I almost never use online help since I usually cannot find the
information I was looking for anyways. Under Windows (where I most often
need help) for example, I often go to the online help because I want to
know what that obscure option does, only to find that only the basic
options are documented, the basic options I know already anyways.
> That for sure. Uncertain is how much information you'll get.
Yeah :( But providing good and useful documentation is extremely hard.
I don't believe the Gimp will succeed, but if it does, it'll be _the_
prototypical "free software rocks" app for another reason again.
--
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---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann +--
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The choice of a GNU generation |
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