On Fri, 23.04.10 10:20, David K?gedal (davidk at lysator.liu.se) wrote: > > Would you prefer some completely unknown and mysterious system to one > > you actually can poke about with and figure out? Honestly, if this > > bothers you, do something about it - speak to the people involved and > > help write the docs. Moaning solve precisely nothing. > > I don't think that's what he meant. There are upsides and downsides to > how Linux works and is developed. I have felt the same frustration about > these kinds of new subsystems that lack documentation. Most recently it > was udev that has no description about its properties, not even in the > source code. Well, the development of Linux is fast and the manpower limited. It is sometimes hard to keep up with the docs about that. However, I am pretty sure that the folks responsiblke for the code usually are happy to respond to any questions people might have. And for udev that is particularly true, as the hotplug ML is quite responsive, and #udev is too. Maybe the documentation for some projects is terse, but the people working on them are very easily accessible, and are happy about contributions in any way including in form of documentation. Maybe some more traditional software systems provide better out-of-the-box documentation, but they certainly don't have their developers that easily and publicly accessible. > Of course we have to moan, otherwise will never document anything they > do. And asking people who know absolutely nothing about something quite > complex and obscure to write the documentation soves precisely nothing. Well, in the end the sources are all open. That means that ultimtely everything can be documented, even without cooperation from the developer. That said developers are usually very open in the free software community. They are just not that into writing documentation (me included), or even good at it due to language barriers and the like. Contributions always welcome. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4
