Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 10:46:19 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@bryden.apana.org.au> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: "Duke Normandin" <01031149@3web.net>, "David Johnson" <djohnson@acuson.com>, <mij@osdn.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: documentation issues generally Message-ID: <00f501c0ab57$0cf59760$0200a8c0@apana.org.au> References: <046701c0ab3c$c4a66300$847e03cb@apana.org.au> <15021.23142.119090.401764@guru.mired.org>
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> The way to deal with that is, of course, to submit improved > documentation to them. They seem both responsive when it comes to > adding submissions from other people, and appreciative of receiving > them. They are more responsive and more appreciative if you mark the > submissions up properly, as that leaves less work for them to do. But > their markup language is easier than modern HTML, and lots of people > have learned that. I lurked in the docs list for while but eventually gave it away after finding that at least 99% of the postings were in some weird language. > > Have you tried submitting something in that format? If not, what did > you base this conclusion on? As indicated above, my experience > submitting things has been pretty good. I wasn't able to figure out anything about the spoken language (terminology) used by the docs folk, let alone the programming language. That stuff is so daunting that I'm not surprised that the operators of the various "user-friendly" sites haven't succeeded in penetrating the docs inner circle. Trying to use the man pages to learn FreeBSD is like trying to use Websters to learn english. I'd expect the results to be mind numbing in either case. Exactly .... however that doesn't stop the experts yelling "RTFM" at people > > > The bottom line is that FreeBSD is a an open source volunteer > project. "Volunteer" means that nothing gets done unless someone steps > up to do it. "Open Source" means anyone who wants to has the > information they need to do that. If you think something in FreeBSD > sucks, you can fix it, so just do it. > I have ample experience with volunteer organizations .... Apana is such a beast :) Its effectively a non-profit / hands on internet training & access provider with some 1000 members across OZ. Something like 50 are on one or more of the regional or national management committees and they are the only ones who do anything .... the bulk of the 200 odd permanent & 700 odd dialup members just want a cheap ISP that never breaks (at least the FreeBSD systems keep going where the linux / AppleMac / Windows ones don't) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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