On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 20:28:40 -0500 (GMT+5) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Doesn't anyone read the documentation anymore? :) I can understand > needing to teach them about configure...
One big problem for new Linux friends, and indeed for new users of most large programs, it the wealth of documentation. Often, the better the software, the more confusing the documentation - look at Eclipse, for a good example. Much of the available documentation is not necessarily accessible to everyone either - I mean, for instance, that if your first language is French, then an English document written by someone who's first language is Cantonese will not necessarily be useful. Who remembers the Japanese Camera manuals of the 1970s - wakarimasu ka? On top of all this is the apparent belief by many programmers that all their users are programmers too. Much of the documentation is so terse (short) that the nuances (important details) are not obvious - much of the autotools documents fall into that category. This, combined with feature-creep (too many obscure options, badly documented), makes a guide written by a third part essential. One of the benefits for (B)LFS is that we document how to build many things in a simple English style that is relatively easy for native speakers to translate. The presence of both American and British English (not to mention Spanish, Dutch and many others) speakers on the team means that the gross idiomatics are filtered out too. If y'all get ma drift? Richard. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
