Fragmentation in Linux Documentation? 61
twilight30 asks: "While trying to figure out why a supposedly-supported SATA-II controller isn't recognized on my motherboard I thought I'd go back and visit the Linux Documentation Project's pages. It was a trip down memory lane, but I soon wondered about the state of many of the documents there. Much of TLDP is old, maybe even crufty. So, I'd like to ask what you think of TLDP.org and its 'competitors'. Do people get info from other sites or Wikis? Are people more likely to look at their distro's forums first? Are distros good enough now that TLDP is basically irrelevant? For the BSDheads, do you think the BSDs' documentation pages have lessons to teach TLDP? Is TLDP still relevant to you? If not, what would have to change for TLDP to become relevant again?"
Wikis are a poor choice for documentation layout. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe I am just too rigid and structured to deal with information that isn't.
Now, if some enterprising soul set up a table of contents and a wiki with an automatically generating index and let the community fill it in, we'd have a good repository.
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Re:Wikis are a poor choice for documentation layou (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen documentation from about every single major IT vendor on the planet and there's one thing I can say with great confidence. Wiki documentation for Ubuntu Linux is at least as "good" overall as any I've seen. I can't count the number of times I've tried to follow documentation to the letter from many vendors only to find the wheels come off in the middle of going through a process. To be fair, I've run into the same thing with Ubuntu Wiki documentation, but no more than
Re:Wikis are a poor choice for documentation layou (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I think Wiki software *is* the right tool for this job, but it must be used correctly. Put proper restrictions on who can edit the pages. Draft standards fo
Re:Wikis are a poor choice for documentation layou (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse than wikis though are using forums for documentation purposes. Using them for support is tolerable, depending on how well moderated the forums are.
Like you, the lack of good, current, and well-organized documentation is one of the reasons I don't use linux, but I'd argue that the problem goes beyond "linux" and is a problem that most open source projects need to solve. There are exceptions, of course, but the fact is most open source advocates are programmers first, and writers second (if at all).
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'cause nobody would write the documentation anyway.
If there is a wiki there is at least one places where info are supposed to be.
If you can't find them you can bug the programmer once and then add it so that those who will follow won't have to do it over and over again.
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I think most packages have good installation instructions, OK usage instructions, and no troubleshooting information. The problem isn't that the programmers don't want to write docs, it's that they have no more idea what to write than you do. Take a look at Linux sound. The ALSA wiki [opensrc.org] is the only place to go to try to find what people have done to get specific cards working or problems solved.
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It's more than tolerable. It's often the quickest way around any immediate problem. I've long been into the habit of (having hit a snag in any particular application) hitting Google with "stinky-finger-program error #nnnnn" and looking for forum entries. The combo is usually very helpful. I no longer want to wade through the documentation unless it relates to something I know I'll use every day.
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I don't have that kind of time to waste. As much as I can't stand wikis as a subsititution for real documentation,
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Google is the only search. It indexes that posts in that forum along with everything else. Google is the best documentation and helpdesk I have ever found.
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Obviously, there are people that love forums for documentation. I hate them. We'll agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Benevolent Dictators Helpful (Score:4, Interesting)
That's terrible, unless you don't have a few people who want to intelligently write a manual. Wiki documentation is better than no documentation.
In the days before Wiki, I ran a FAQ-O-Matic. Having people do the editing was great, but I had to put in effort as a benevolent dictator to keep it neat and meaningful. Jon Howell had a great thing going, but ultimately, it was too hard to move from one machine to another, and I haven't seen a new release in years. It would be nice to have a mode in a Wiki that enforced a hierarchical structure like FAQ-O-Matic did, for certain classes of data.
It's hard to tell if the contents/chapters/index model is the right one for a manual, or just something we're all used to with half a millennium of momentum behind it.
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Using drupal's book module you can create hierarchies and restrict users by path.
Users can then create and/or edit pages as appropriate.
The permissions aren't quite granular enough to do all that you want, I don't think, but adding permissions and permission checks is trivial. And I mean that. I am not much of a programmer, so if I say it's trivial, then it's true :)
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hierarchical wiki (Score:1)
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Professional ventures will often have good pure technical specification, but especially how-tos tend to get outdated rapidly, or omit things because the developers see things differently from the users.
I don't use any particular wiki either, though. They just augment my Google.
About your properly-indexed wiki idea; A lot (most?) of the distro wikis out there seem to employ some form o
Research on online documentation (Score:2)
TLDP was useful at one time (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a lot of popular distros that do things in their own way. For example, the commands that work in Fedora will not work in Ubuntu without changing paths, package names etc... Its always favourable to have distro specific pages that allow everyone to copy-paste the commands without messing up on the fine details.
Secondly, I view whatever tldp has as a very good source to learn something. The information there is presented in a very generic way, and very well laid out - for example read the software raid howto over there and tell me whether you'll see that quality elsewhere.
But in this day of n00bs switching over, wiki pages are the way to go for popular information. Afterall, its the "in" thing now, has the web 2.0 touches and appeals to a very large crowd. The bottom line is that tldp isn't dead, just that its roles has changed a great deal in the last 5 years.
Re:TLDP was useful at one time (Score:5, Insightful)
I need to second Gentoo-Wiki as a wiki done right. When I need to get something working, 99% of the time, Gentoo-Wiki has me covered. As far as formal documentation is concerned, no, it is not the best perhaps. But as far as useful documentation is concerned, it does a great job.
There are weak spots in some smaller sections that I've found, but it's generally enough to get me started. Furthermore, once I figure out some more details about what I am trying to accomplish, I just update the wiki ;)
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typo (Score:2)
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Agree: Gentoo Wiki is great, even for non-Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Google (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget "blog search" if "web search" doesn't get you what you want.
Also, when you figure it out, give something back: post the solution someplace. Anyplace.
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Defragmentation? (Score:4, Funny)
*ducks*
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Question: (Score:2, Insightful)
Best doc available is on IRC ! (Score:3, Insightful)
<twilight30> Hi guys. My SATA-II controler is not recognized altough it is officially supported under Linux. Any idea ?
<l33tn3rd> RTFM n00b !
<twilight30> I would be glad to read it if only I could find it
<l33tn3rd> STFW l0ser : http://www.tldp.org/
<twilight30> Already been there. It's outdated and I haven't found any valuable piece of info. Any idea ?
*** l33tn3rd sets mode: +b twilight30*!*@*.*
*** twilight30 has been kicked my l33tn3rd ( STFU n' get BSD u moron ! )
<l33tn3rd> lol pwned !
<ub3rg33k> fucking n00bs. Oh btw hav u seen the last Natalie Portman vidz on youtube ? ROFL !
<l33tn3rd> lol got the complete vidz on torrent
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There's a limit... (Score:3, Funny)
Fragmented, yes (Score:1)
For specific things (e.g. driver issues), I've found myself increasingly using forums first then wikis, google second. It's amazing how good the distro forums have become because the community has become more tolerant to newb and intermediate users (well, Ubuntu in particular).
It seems that 90% of the time just searching the Ubuntu forums gives the answer I was looking for
Was wondering just the same thing today (Score:2)
Distro forums aren't very good. (Score:3, Interesting)
It bears mentioning again: The questions were worded well, with important details provided.
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advices are utterly inadequate too....
like a dkpg-reconfigure --all
just to reconfigure ONE package that failed....
(and reading at the man of the command won't help you to much either because then you have to know what is the package that accept the reconfiguration since the command returns nothing in numerous cases...)
of course it works.....no it doesn't really help in the long time.
Should I mention how many dummies are just advicing to change edgy to feisty in so
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Hey, since we're not providing any links, we can just make up any old crap, yes? Oops! Did I just give away your secret posting technique? Sorry...
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Wait...not providing contact information? So we can say any old thing online without accountability, right? A four-digit UID is the only thing separating you from Anonymous Cowards. Well, that, and I've seen better comments posted as AC.
As one example, I encountered a bizarre issue with the NVIDIA driver that responded in some sort of object allocation error. A google for the error came back with an Ubuntu forum post complete with a description of
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Since you're having trouble understanding me, let me put it more clearly. I constantly hear these whines about poor support on forums, yet the whiner (in this case, you) never provides a link to the thread illustrating his point. And when I go to the Ubuntu forums what I see is useful advice being given to help people solve their problems. You'd think if there were so many threads where no help was given, you'd manage to link to at least one or two, no?
I t
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"Contact information"? What are you talking about?
A means of sending you a link after this /. article expires.
Since you're having trouble understanding me, let me put it more clearly. I constantly hear these whines about poor support on forums, yet the whiner (in this case, you) never provides a link to the thread illustrating his point. And when I go to the Ubuntu forums what I see is useful advice being given to help people solve their problems. You'd think if there were so many threads where no help was given, you'd manage to link to at least one or two, no?
I don't go directly to Ubuntu forums, I google for the problem. For better or for worse, the Ubuntu forums' site's pagerank puts it at or near the top of the search results every time.
I think you just make this crap up, frankly. And you've done it again with your Nvidia error post. Maybe that is a true story, but I seriously doubt it since you can't even get it straight in your own post (how was it that he "refused to understand" something, when he never had any replies?)
You seriously need to see someone about your paranoia. In addition, you should pay attention to the context of statements. I mentioned two people in my post: Some poor sap who posted to the forum without receiving a reply, and my roommate for whom I was trying t
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I still think you're out of line with criticising the Ubuntu forums though. No doubt there are *some* problems they can't fix, but it's certainly not the general case. If you don't
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You make a claim that flies in the face of common experience
Maybe for others with simple problems. My experience probably mirrors other power users'.
and you don't bother providing a link to back it up when it should be trivial to do so.
Finding a specific forum post when one doesn't even remember the exact keywords used to find it is no mean feat, especially for a forum site as large as Ubuntu's. What do you want? Idetic memory?
I still think you're out of line with criticising the Ubuntu forums though. No doubt there are *some* problems they can't fix, but it's certainly not the general case.
Quite possibly true. My original post was from the perspective of a power user, but I didn't make that sufficiently clear.
In my experience, the "general case" consists of ten or fifteen problems which are encountered multi
News to me... (Score:4, Insightful)
99.99% of the time I use only one resource. (Score:2)
Actually looking at the project page, wiki, or forum manually is a desperate and last resort and rarely yields an answer if google didnt (probably because those are all in the google index).
Linux doc fragmentation predates TLDP (Score:1)
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I think you're absolutely right: the development model difference between Linux and the BSD's (apart from the fact that there are different distros thereof) is that of unity -- Linux only has the kernel under control of a central unit (Linus) -- FreeBSD, and I would guess OpenBSD as well, has a complete operating system under a cent
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I think you ma
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I was just thinking earlier today about if Linux distros don't do a good job of quality control then the BSD's might become more main stream. For example: I was recently using Kubuntu, I did a basic package update, and all of the sudden my X(org) config becaume useless. I think the distros are going to have to be extremely good at delivering consistancy to avoid such simple changes causing such drastic changes.
I did find out that I could get Flash running by installing the flashplugin9 port with the lin
google? (Score:2)
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