And I forgot to say... In practical usage, there should be an open mailing list where anybody can send their two cents, which the maintainers subscribe to. Each will have their own login, so should someone mail a typo in, any of the maintainers can go in and fix it. A log of changes is kept, and a mail can be generated each night with a summary of updates.
That's all. -fr. -- Feargal Reilly, Codeshifter, Chrysalink Systems. On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:54:09 +0100 Feargal Reilly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Since I started this thread, here's my thoughts. > > Documentation is *always* the hardest thing to get people to do. > > If somebody has decent coding ability, they'll prefer to contribute to a > project by fixing bugs, or adding features. (They will of course fail to > document these contributions too :) ) > > There are usually a slew of users who do not have the ability to > contribute in this way, but they do have the experience of MAKING IT > WORK. These are the people who think, "Wow! This really helped me out, I wish > I could give something back." They may be sysadmins who don't code, but know > how to read man pages. They may be C hackers who faint at the site of Perl. > Whatever. > Given the opportunity to present their experiences though, they will. > > And since this is the hardest thing to get people to do, you have to make it > as easy as possible for them. Given this, as much as I love LaTeX, and as > useful CVS is, very few people will learn the unfamiliar just to contribute a > flag they found useful with procmail. > > It was with this in mind, for another project that I hacked up a web > interface for people to use. I've thrown it up an example at > http://www.helgrim.com/dbmaildocs/ > > The interface is at http://www.helgrim.com/dbmaildocs/manage/ username and > password is 'guest' > > Everything is stored in a database, HTML generated on the fly, PDFs > periodically. Since it's aimed at HTML, there'd be no problem generating > LaTeX files too. > > There'd be no problem setting it as docs.dbmail.com, or for the dbmail guys > to grab the files periodically. > > Comments? > > -fr. > > -- > Feargal Reilly, > Codeshifter, > Chrysalink Systems. > > > On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:26:14 +0200 > Magnus Sundberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > lou wrote: > > > In some email I received from Roel Rozendaal - IC&S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > on Wed, 18 Jun 2003 > > > 12:17:08 +0200, wrote: > > > > <snip> > > > > > > > > I think so, easy to update, and add automatically date automatically for > > > the last update > > > also it's very simple. > > > I also think LaTeX. > > > > > > Any other ideas? Since we manage to agree on the future existence of > > > dbmail-doc. > > > There're some more stuff to be discussed. Forms and stuff, blahblah you > > > know. > > > > > I disagree on the LaTex issue, I believe we should use the > > infrastructure from the Linux Documentation Project. To make it > > consistent with most other documentation. > > > > Another approach is some kind of databse driven manual, something > > like the online mysql manual with comments. > > > > I doubt I will be writing any documents of the former type, but I > > am quite shure I will contribute with comments to the later. > > > > Magnus > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Dbmail mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail > > > > > -- > Feargal Reilly, > Codeshifter, > Chrysalink Systems. > _______________________________________________ > Dbmail mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail > -- Feargal Reilly, Codeshifter, Chrysalink Systems.
