[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: if SGML is so great...



On Wed, May 03, 2000 at 02:58:23AM -0400, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
> >>>>> "K" == Kevin Turner <Kevin.Turner@oberlin.edu> writes:
> 
>     K> The last time someone asked for help with this on the Open
>     K> Source Writer's Group list [1] (I think it was for the
>     K> "Replacing NT with Linux HOWTO"), no less than four volunteers
>     K> signed up to help with the transition.
> 
> And what happens with the updates?  As I've said before, the Linux
> kernel will welcome a really clever hack in VBasic, but they won't
> tolerate continual updates in that form (unless it is blazingly
> brilliant)
> 
> I think the LDP needs to be exactly the same.

Do you?  

I guess I haven't paid any attention to the submission queue, but it was
not my impression that you had so many good authors that you were at
leisure to pick and choose among them.  Rather, my impression of the
atmosphere was that the free software as a community as a whole needs
more documentation desperately, and so I would think you would welcome
good content in whatever form you could get it.

If, on the other hand, you believe "Most of what we want has already
been written, it's just so poorly organized that we need structure to
find it," *then* you have reason to be picky about the syntax, rather
than the content.

Could this bit of matinance be viewed as an acceptible cost?  Many other
roles in software development have seen similar divisions of labour.
When the programmer of FooApp releases the new version, the package
maintainer curses and swears that he's changed the pathnames again, and
the translator groans at all the little changes in punctuation to the
strings he has to re-translate, but the three of them end up with a much
more useful package than the programmer had when he started, and it's
certainly nothing the package maintainer could have done on his own.

And seriously, someone who writes plain-text doing in-place edits on a
docbook file is probably going to do very little damage.  Unlike putting
VB code in the kernel, it'll probably still compile, and even be
readable at that.

> Is that Deb who is fleeing the country?

Indeed.  Well, from my point of view, anyway.  To you, she's an
immigrant.  ;)

-- 
Kevin Turner <acapnotic@users.sourceforge.net> | OpenPGP encryption welcome here


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to ldp-discuss-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org