Chainsawing the "Mouse" section of the FAQ

[Michael W . Lucas]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 03:16:07PM +0100, Nik Clayton wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 12:09:43PM -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> > "Michael W . Lucas" <mwlucas at blackhelicopters.org> writes:
> > > Any comments?
> > 
> > Sure.  Your considerable talents would be better spent on the FreeBSD
> > Handbook.  The FAQ should be a delete-only document.  The sooner it rots
> > away, the better.  It's upkeep involves a duplication of effort that is
> > worse than useless, as it tends to force FreeBSD users to have to hunt
> > for information in an extra place for information that is not
> > necessarily any more helpful than what the Handbook (or an Article) has
> > (or should have).  It's bad enough that the FDP has to duplicate so much
> > of what xfree86.org has on mouse configuration, but that's given the
> > existance and nature of "moused", I guess there's no alternative to
> > that.
> 
> Hmm.
> 
> I quite like the idea of the FAQ merging in to the Handbook.
> 
> Each chapter starts with a "Synopsis" section -- there's no reason why
> they couldn't end with a "FAQ" section.  If we wanted a separate FAQ
> document, it could be generated by pulling out all the FAQ sections from
> the Handbook.

Didn't we hash this out a couple of years ago?  :-)

Personally, I think that the FAQ and the Handbook serve two different
purposes.  The Handbook is tutorial-oriented, the FAQ is for quick
answers to basic questions.  We need both.

Integrating the two into the Handbook would be nice, if it gets
maintained and someone can write the toolchain glue to pull the FAQ
out.  My energy for that sort of work is going into books for the
forseeable future, however.

In the meantime, I'm willing to help clean up the existing FAQ so that
it's more useful and usable.

==ml

-- 
Michael Lucas		mwlucas at FreeBSD.org, mwlucas at BlackHelicopters.org
http://www.BlackHelicopters.org/~mwlucas/

           Absolute BSD:   http://www.AbsoluteBSD.com/