[linux-audio-user] some thoughts about Linux audio software documentation

[robin fell]

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 22:39, John Check wrote:
> On Thursday 12 August 2004 05:50 pm, Rick B wrote:
<snip>
> > .... it is the
> > fact that most of the developers are coders as well as musicians, and
> > thus have their proverbial plate full with two very time consuming
> > pursuits, and have no time left to keep the documentation up to date.
> 
> And that's precisely why we have to consider developers for whom coding isn't 
> a primary skill. If we can make things more attractive for people who can 
> build and test things without side tracking them, we would have a bigger pool 
> of documentation maintainers.

I'm not sure it's possible to attract testing effort _without_
sidetracking those people - it's somewhat of a necessity given the
(often alpha) nature of the development.  You need a certain sort of
person to deal with frustration and testing - preferably one who has an
axe to grind :)

Some time ago I offered my services (months of cvs up; ./configure;
make; make install every night) to a project in the knowledge that it
would consume all of my spare time for a few months -  and I did so for
two reasons;

1.  due to an accident I had rather a lot of time to spare, and wanted
to make something useful from that time
2.  i believed in the goals of that project and wanted to help it reach
those goals (so I could actually use it - [see, selfish really]).

Perhaps others can offer alternative (ideally honest) reasons - if we
need people to knock the rough edges off of the 'product', then we need
to know who they are and why they do it.

For my part, I evangelise Linux Audio to anyone who'll listen.  I send
them URL's when they least expect it.  I also conduct
reading-comprehension tests to make sure they read them :)

cheers
R