Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 09:31:09 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au> To: "Eric Ogren" <eogren@earthlink.net>, "John Baldwin" <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: docs/18683: Insufficient detail in /usr/src/UPDATING instruc Message-ID: <02eb01bfc2b3$7c72b510$847e03cb@ROADRUNNER> References: <200005200230.TAA61531@freefall.freebsd.org> <20000520142528.KWQH22611.mail.rdc1.va.home.com@john.baldwin.cx> <20000520114510.A775@earthlink.net>
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I'm a relative newbie to unix generally .... been lurking in -docs for a while to see what the "official" attitude is to documentation. I've found that while there is less documentation on FreeBSD than there is on for example Redhat, what documentation there is appears to be somewhat more intelligible. However its virtually all prepared by experts in their field (and thats OK if other experienced unix users are on the receiving end) consequently many minor but critical points are omitted. My suggestion is to do away totally with the traditional ethos of employing experts to write the stuff ..... find someone who is struggling with the subject to do documentation to head the documentation production team .... the idea being that if a newbie can comprehend the stuff than it's sufficiently verbose for anyone.\ I'm making an attempt here to churn out some newbie-friendly stuff, long way to go yet but the compliments I've been receiving from newbies over the week since I put the presenly available material online indicate that something like it has been needed for a long time. www.apana.org.au/FreeBSD/FreeBSD_Tutorial/ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Ogren" <eogren@earthlink.net> To: "John Baldwin" <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2000 1:45 AM Subject: Re: docs/18683: Insufficient detail in /usr/src/UPDATING instruc > On Sat, May 20, 2000 at 10:26:16AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote: > > People have to start somewhere, and if we are going to grow our userbase, > > we will have to appeal to more newbies. There's more to making a widely > > used OS than writing code. :-) > > Well, I'm not one of the "make the OS as obscure as possible, so nobody > but experienced users can use it", but I also think that we should > discourage newbies from performing an activity that could potentially > completely screw up their installation. > I certainly think that we should appeal to more newbies, and indeed > that's why I have sent in a couple of PRs to the doc-team, because, like > pretty much any open source project, the docs tend to lag behind the > code. I just think we should try to avoid throwing newbies in over their > head; you wouldn't ask an average NT user to set up a 5,000 user domain (I > can't think of anything analagous(sp) to upgrading via source), and I > don't think we should be encouraging a FreeBSD user who doesn't know how > to mount his drives to undertake a potentially dangerous upgrade. > > Eric > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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