Where is FreeBSD going?

Gary W. Swearingen underway at comcast.net
Thu Jan 8 17:09:34 PST 2004


des at des.no (Dag-Erling Smørgrav) writes:

> Anyone who is reasonably familiar with HTML can learn enough DocBook
> to contribute to the FDP in a matter of minutes.

It's not even that hard, as they may submit plain text or even just a
report of the problem.  But unless you're contributing some important
missing content, whatever you contribute will be met with requests to
do better, and you'll feel embarassed about leaving others to do your
grunt work.  Or you'll tire of getting someone to do it as you wanted
it, or at all.  Even if you know or learn DocBook and the FDP primer,
you'll be grieved by silly things like deleting spaces where you
shouldn't have, or using the "xyz" manpage entity instead of the "xyz"
command entity.

The system obviously works; I'm just saying what seems undeniable:
that a simpler source language would draw more contributions, and what
is just my opinion: that a simpler wiki-like language with only a
handful of lanugage elements would make for better documentation
because it would have better content, at the small cost of being a
little uglier and harder for someone to sell in book form.


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