Adam Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Yes I can put some effort into this assuming I have the blessing of the > Debian community. You might have to explain the due process with regard > to making changes.
Sure. Get CVS access to the boot-floppies area, look around in the documentation subdir, and hack away. You can either send results as patches to the [email protected] list, or, if they are no-brainers, request CVS write access and commit them in CVS directly. > As I said, I'm looking to start a course here in Melbourne and I've > allocated resources to do quite a bit of writing notes, I'd rather put > that into something that can be used by the Debian and Linux communities > in general than contribute another thread to the tangle. Well, it's more a question of someone helping with the labor required to maintain the documentation than another "thread". It's seductive to write a new document, but not the most valuable contribution for users or developers. > For what it's worth I think the Debian documentation is good, at least > on a par with other Linux documentation, I am sure everyone would agree > that continuous improvement is however desirable. Yah. > > AFAICT the main technical advantages of the newer doc is that it has tables > > and pictures. Neither of those can be added to the official installation > > manual because DebianDoc SGML doesn't support it. Well, yes, both would require moving to DocBook, which is probably a good idea anyhow, but not one I'm able to execute right now. > > The main advantages regarding the text itself is that it's shorter > > and more to the point, and that it's less official in tone. We > > can't really have much of that in the official manual because it > > has to have more detailed explanations, cover a range of possible > > options during the installation, and it has to sound official > > because that's what it is. Well, the solution there is to have an early-on "quick-start" section, a few pages being all you need to really know. The really hard thing is dealing with all the different architectures, really. > > I don't know about you guys, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't take > > me more than a couple of days to merge in 100KB of content within > > a text twice as large. But someone's got to write those 100KB of > > text, and that's what I wouldn't be able to do in the same time, > > not a chance. I can't see, Josip, how you can plausibly claim that the labor is actually less if you write a document in isolation, and then merge it into another document. Have you ever tried doing that? I have -- numerous times. For instance, merging architecture-specific documentaiton into the main install manual, or even in looking to merge the installation manual into the Installation HOWTO. The fact is that it's twice as much work -- it's like writing the documentation twice. -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
