On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 16:56 -0600, John Morris wrote:
That really isn't fair. It's a chicken and the egg problem
in that the
only way someone outside could write documentation is if someone inside
gives them some rudimentary documentation first. After all, by your
reasoning anyone skilled enough to read the source should be adding
features and fixing bugs so apparently that route to knowledge is out.
Outside help can clean up documentation, enhance documentation, take
manpage level documentation and write detailed howtos for mortal users
to follow. If they have some help from the developers they can even
update documentation to track changes. Waiting for someone to appear
and present documentation from scratch for a system that nobody outside
the development team has knowledge of is asking for a miracle.
Outside people can create lists of things they'd like to see documented,
create questions for the developer to answer, prepare shells of
documentation that need details filled in, and talk with the developer
to get that information. That would go a lot farther to having good
documentation than lamenting the fact that none exists and doing nothing
about it.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/jkeating