On 2014-09-04 17:00 -0400, Shawn H Corey wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Sep 2014 16:33:13 -0400
> Nick Bowler <nbow...@elliptictech.com> wrote:
> > Can you be more constructive? I think Autoconf and Automake have
> > rather good manuals[1][2]. Why are they crappy? How can we make
> > them better?
> >
> > [1] https://gnu.org/s/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html
> > [2] https://gnu.org/s/automake/manual/automake.html
>
> When was the last time you read completely through those manuals?
> There's too much information all at once.
I have never read the manuals cover-to-cover. But by now I have probably
read most, if not all of the material in them over the course of ~10 years.
But this puts me in a bad position to critique the manual from the
perspective of newbies: as I know Autoconf rather well I am unlikely to
notice if some details are missing from the manual.
> And I didn't say the manuals were bad. It's that the documentation is
> too dense and not organized for learning. In other words, crappy.
Sorry, I am having a hard time reconciling these two statements.
> It took me two days to find the diagram on my blog from Wikipedia. It
> should have been one of the first things I searched for.
Similar diagrams are found at the very beginning of chapter 3 ("Making
configure scripts") of the Autoconf manual. Would changing them or
perhaps adding another diagram here improve the manual?
Thanks,
--
Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)
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