On Wed, 2006-05-07 at 23:46 +0200, Udo 'Robos' Puetz wrote: > __Straight from the docs__ > > -hda file > -hdb file
Yes, but the doc doesn't, for example, explain how you are supposed to put a bootable image in "file". This is addressed by the excellent responses from Nathaniel and Rick, and I included it in my proposed tutorial. This is the sort of thing that might be obvious to you in hindsight (you're very involved in qemu) but won't be to a lot of people who are technically competent, but don't already know qemu. > I *guess* you, daniel, would have liked something where you had it all > pre-chewed so that you don't have to read. If what you mean is "good documentation", yes, that would be nice. Feel free to use my proposed tutorial, I would be flattered if you did. And yes, I do know a couple of things about documentation. Good documentation gives clear steps and doesn't leave important things unexplained. Step-by-step procedures, even if they don't exactly match the reader's use case (but can be generalized), are a good idea. > Some other people said it before in other contexts, I repeat it for qemu: > it isn't free, you have to pay by reading stuff (short version) That's a very sad attitude. That's not the attitude that I took when I wrote the user guide for OpenOffice.org (http://oooauthors.org). I took the attitude that documentation is critically important and that to serve its role well one has to put a strong focus on clarity and explanation. It is tempting to simply list all the features that a program has. But a feature-based documentation is mostly useful as a reference. That is, something you use once you have the mechanism down. It is critically important to write task-based documentation. In other words, ask "what does the user want to do?" and write down how to do it. > If you become agitated because some docs are (in your opinion) bad, think > about what you "paid" for it and - in my case - I still see the (bad) docs > but keep myself from insulting people who work for free and in their free > time!! I have spent a lot of time working for free on my free time, so I know the feeling. I still say that making things difficult and calling it "payment" is not a good attitude. Other people in this list took the approach of helping solve a problem and in turn I suggested a tutorial that would cover this situation. Cheers, Daniel. -- http://opendocumentfellowship.org "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men." -- George Bernard Shaw
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