From owner-freebsd-doc Wed Oct 18 11:56: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (winston.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.27.229]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4435C37B4D7 for ; Wed, 18 Oct 2000 11:55:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by winston.osd.bsdi.com (8.11.0/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e9IInhA68768; Wed, 18 Oct 2000 11:49:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com) To: Steve Roome Cc: peter@sysadmin-inc.com, "'Jason C. Wells'" , freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How To's [about to get flamed] In-Reply-To: Message from Steve Roome of "Wed, 18 Oct 2000 14:46:54 BST." <20001018144654.C25899@moose.bri.hp.com> Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 11:49:43 -0700 Message-ID: <68764.971894983@winston.osd.bsdi.com> From: Jordan Hubbard Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > [ .. intro snipped .. ] > > But after using FreeBSD almost daily since v2.0.5 I've only > contributed about one page of (badly written!) documentation to the > FAQ. > > This is because it's so damn difficult to contribute anything for most > of us. Maybe not for you, but that's different! I certainly won't disagree that some people in the FreeBSD project can be difficult to deal with and are guilty of all the things that you say, but it doesn't change the fact that they and a number of other barriers are simple facts of life in the FreeBSD project. Only aggressive, retroactive genetic engineering or major changes in project infrastructure will change that. For those more focused on what we can accomplish here and now, however, we have to accept certain operating conditions and work around them: 1. Some people will be annoying. These people need to have less importance in your mind than accomplishing the desired task or they'll defeat you every time. 2. Joining committers is a "heavy-weight" task and not as simple as having someone put your HOWTO.txt document up on an FTP site or posting it to USENET in hopes that someone else will pick it up and incorporate it. The upside to that additional overhead is that there's one canonical place to look for documentation (such is not true for Linux) and it's provided already marked-up and ready for conversion to multiple other formats. I think Mr. Roome has simply given up to easily by focusing largely on the short term pain rather than the long term goal of documentation in this project and he's hardly the first to do so. To be certain, lowering short-term pain of any kind is always a goal of this project but the actual work is also always done by those willing to deal with whatever levels of it may be present at any given time. Writing documentation is task for which a high tolerence to pain is always a necessary attribute anyway. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message