The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Debian Documention: the really big picture

>>>>> Susan G Kleinmann writes:

> Here's a thought I've had for a while but have hesitated to say:

> I believe that what Debian really want is the equivalent of the
> HOWTO's re-written in a way that's specifically targetted to Debian
> systems.  If one were to see Debian-specific HOWTO's as the end-goal
> of our documentation efforts, then the scale and organization of the
> effort might be done differently.

I think this whole HOWTO business is a HUGE MISTAKE! Why? Because we
have all these wonderful little documents describing a small aspect of
managing and/or using Linux and nobody is caring about putting it all
together.  Look at the state the LDP manuals are in! Apart form IGS and
NAG none was updated in a long time, but in the same period a huge amount
of HOWTO's appeared.

And sometimes HOWTO's just document work-arounds for broken software
implementations, which will never get fixed, because after documenting
them in an HOWTO they become a feature.

IMHO we need to have a complete and publishable set of manuals which
document our system.  The goal of the LDP to provide a single set of
manuals for the whole Linux community, however noble it is, has to fail
because of the diversity.  Not two distributions are alike, apart from
the absolute minimal consensus: the FHS.

So my proposal is to proceed in two phases:

1) Overhaul the current documentation as it is right now, to provide
   as much information as possible for the upcoming Debian 1.3 release.

   That would mean:

   a) Update the existing FAQs and manuals.
   b) Check the manual and info pages for consistency.
   c) Convert as much as possible to HTML.
   d) Translate as much as possible.  At least the installation manuals
      should be available in the major international languages like
      french, spanish, russian and chinese. With less important languages
      like german, dutch, italian, portuguese, japanese, etc being added
      if possible.  As simple call for help on debian-user should do the
      trick.

2) Start with the LDP manuals, adapt them to Debian and complete them,
   so that we have a complete set of manuals for the 1.4/2.0 release.

There are so many people around on our lists who would like to
contribute to the project without doing actual package management,
this is one way they could.

> To me, the worst aspect of this idea is that it has the appearance
> of leading to a fragmentation of the Linux community.  At best,
> however, it provides a great ready-made roadmap that would help us
> develop documentation that would really help users get the most out
> of their Debian systems.

The Linux community is already fragmented, even more than the BSD
community, they have at least a common system from which they started,
the only thing that is common to all of them are the kernel and the 
core GNU utilities like gcc, binutils, etc.

> Flame away.  Susan Kleinmann

I think we all agreed that no further flaming would take place on the
mailing lists, didn't we?

Dominik
-- 
The text above represents my personal opinion and does not represent the
official position of my employer on the issue(s) discussed.  Any official
statement by me on behalf of my employer will be marked as such.