12 Aug
2004
12 Aug
'04
9:56 p.m.
Last Thursday 12 August 2004 23:05, Lee Revell was like:
On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 17:50, Rick B wrote:
What Dave says about the length of time it takes to gain a working familiarity
with the application you're trying to document is relevant here, having
seriously considered the issue. In the long term, I'd like to contribute in
this way, I know I'm capable of writing procedural documentation but as yet
I'm expert at very little of the software and life has a way of keeping me
busy, so I can't promise much.
Dave Phillips wrote:
That is the state of most Linux documentation today, most of it is
out dated, and anyone who has used Linux for a time will realize that
anything older than 6 months *might* be wrong. It is easy to see where
the problem is within the Linux audio developers community, 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.
The fact that the development process is so fast just compounds the
problem. The answer to the problem might be for the developers to have a
book (an indepth manual if you will) published for them, once the
application gets to a certian stage of maturity, that the public can buy.
This would also provide a means for the developers to allow the
application to be free, and still make a living. If a person doesn't
wan't to buy the book they don't have to, they are perfectly free to sort
through the online documentation. With other apps (cubase,protools,etc.)
you have to buy the app and the book.
What is needed is for non-coders who understand the apps to write the
documentation, "power users" in the Windows-speak (I always hated the
term). The developers are glad to help you if you have a question like
"I am writing some docs for $FOO, why does it do $BAR, and what is the
$BAZ menu for?". This is a great way for non-coders to contribute to
open source. The problem is there are a lot more people willing to
write code for
free than write user documentation for free. Many developers are not
native English speakers, so in many cases it is much harder to write
good English user docs than write code! Developer documentation is much
easier because there is already a common language.
I'd be happy to proof read / ghost write any such documentation if the basic
information is already there and just needs pulling into shape.
If you are a user willing to contribute documentation,
the developers
will bend over backwards to help you, because good user documentation
equals fewer spurious bug reports and happier users.
Well, this is my first attempt:
http://wiki.agnula.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=DeMuDi-config-HOWTO
cheers
tim hall