Re: Offering to fill a hole in the GNOME documentation.

["David C. Mason" <dcm redhat com>]

Timothy Murphy <tim@maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> 
> Where is "the current documentation"?

Like I told Peter, its in the desktop-docs/ module of the GNOME CVS
server, or you can grab a tarball from
http://www.gnome.org/users-guide/project.shtml


> The only documentation I could see mentioned on http://www.gnome.org/
> was the GNOME Users Guide and the gnome-faq.
> I thought the former was moderately good (beta minus),
> while the latter was poor (gamma).
> I had the impression it was written by a developer
> to tell users what he thought they should know,
> rather than an attempt to answer questions
> which might actually arise.

I can not answer to the FAQ as I have nothing to do with it. You will
see the maintainers of the FAQ in the FAQ itself. I'm sorry you think
the Users Guide is *beta minus* at best, but if your help is the only
way we can make it alpha then please.. ahem.. "Bring it on".

> 
> Incidentally, the TeX version of gnome-faq
> is neither a TeX nor a LaTeX file.
> (It appears to be a subset of a TeX file.)

Again, I can't help you with this, although I believe they are using
SGML with the DocBook DTD like we are and the TeX it makes to create
PostScript is very unreadable. That does not mean it does not make
good output, it just means they do not use TeX to make the file and
neither should you if you want to help them out.


> 
> As a GNOME newbie, I very much like the overall look of GNOME,
> but feel the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.
> 


Please add the missing parts and clean up the "undesirable" parts
thats how this whole thing works. If you feel you can do some decent
writing please submit it to me and I will make sure it is in the same
voice as what is currently there (with your input, of course) and
check it in.

Without concrete examples of what you feel is wrong with it we can go
nowhere. Without your help we can do about the same amount of work in
the next year as we have done in the first year.


Cheers,

Dave

-- 

          David Mason
        Red Hat AD Labs

        dcm@redhat.com