Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 11:49:43 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com> To: Steve Roome <steve@sse0691.bri.hp.com> Cc: peter@sysadmin-inc.com, "'Jason C. Wells'" <jcwells@nwlink.com>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How To's [about to get flamed] Message-ID: <68764.971894983@winston.osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: Message from Steve Roome <steve@sse0691.bri.hp.com> of "Wed, 18 Oct 2000 14:46:54 BST." <20001018144654.C25899@moose.bri.hp.com>
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> [ .. intro snipped .. ]
>
> But after using FreeBSD almost daily since v2.0.5 I've only
> contributed about one page of (badly written!) documentation to the
> FAQ.
>
> This is because it's so damn difficult to contribute anything for most
> of us. Maybe not for you, but that's different!
I certainly won't disagree that some people in the FreeBSD project can
be difficult to deal with and are guilty of all the things that you
say, but it doesn't change the fact that they and a number of other
barriers are simple facts of life in the FreeBSD project. Only
aggressive, retroactive genetic engineering or major changes in
project infrastructure will change that.
For those more focused on what we can accomplish here and now, however,
we have to accept certain operating conditions and work around them:
1. Some people will be annoying. These people need to have less
importance in your mind than accomplishing the desired task
or they'll defeat you every time.
2. Joining committers is a "heavy-weight" task and not as simple
as having someone put your HOWTO.txt document up on an FTP site
or posting it to USENET in hopes that someone else will pick it
up and incorporate it.
The upside to that additional overhead is that there's one canonical
place to look for documentation (such is not true for Linux) and it's
provided already marked-up and ready for conversion to multiple other
formats.
I think Mr. Roome has simply given up to easily by focusing largely on
the short term pain rather than the long term goal of documentation in
this project and he's hardly the first to do so. To be certain,
lowering short-term pain of any kind is always a goal of this project
but the actual work is also always done by those willing to deal with
whatever levels of it may be present at any given time. Writing
documentation is task for which a high tolerence to pain is always a
necessary attribute anyway. :-)
- Jordan
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