what makes you write community documentation?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 18:10 -0500, Dan Smith wrote: 
> Paul basically said that only one way should be documented. He appears
> to be strongly opposed to the idea of documenting different ways of
> doing things. 

That's a fairly inaccurate representation of what I said, so I think you
may want to reread my earlier post to get the gist of it.  Let me
requote myself here for accuracy:

"The right way to do things is not to show a slew of solutions and let
the user pick.  The user has already consulted documentation because
they don't know how to pick; it's the job of the core documentation to
give the simplest and most efficient solution.  This doesn't mean there
can't be auxiliary documentation about many solutions; there are many
examples of good docs that do just that.  But before doing any
documentation in that realm, we need a stronger core docs set."

That statement is actually not far removed at all from what Karsten
said.

>         Sorry, without Paul's comment to compare it to, I'm
>         guessing.  I presume
>         you mean his comments that we want to document the default
>         installed
>         applications before we branch into non-defaults also available
>         for 
>         Fedora.  My comment above is that the reason we don't have the
>         default
>         camera stuff well covered is a lack of resources.  Whoever is
>         working on
>         the User Guide decides what are the priorities for
>         coverage.  If there 
>         isn't a person or time to get to cameras, it is not in that
>         guide. 
> 
> 
> As for default install that I'm not as sure of. I have never used the
> default install.

The core documentation, at least inasmuch as guides for beginners are
involved, should concern itself precisely with the default installation.
That is, in fact, what a beginner would logically install, having no
basis for making any other choices.

[...snip...]

>         Part of the problem with not having enough writers on the
>         project is the 
>         task list is incomplete. 
> 
> This sounds like a good place to review the task list. I've noticed
> quite a few missing areas such as text processing.  I'd suggest taking
> one section a week and building a task list from a concencious on the
> list. 

Start this thread then, sounds good to me.

[...snip...]

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
      Fedora Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PaulWFrields
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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