3 Mar
2008
3 Mar
'08
8:13 a.m.
On Wednesday 27 February 2008, Stefan Sayer wrote:
Hi Stefan,
well, for the development of new (and the maintainance of existing) code this
model works fairly well for the project. But for documentation it don't work,
even if most people would admit that the lack of docs is a problem for them.
Its hard to get even decent config file examples..
Newcomers join the project, have problems to get through the basics, and after
they've learned the small piece of knowledge that they need for the moment,
most of them forgot about the problem. We developers sometimes don't
understand the problems of our users anymore, and for some time it was not
really enforced thorough the project that features without documentation are
almost useless..
But nobody have said this is an easy problem. :-)
It will not change overnight, but progress is inevitable if we keep trying to
improve the situation. ;-)
Cheers,
Henning
Now the big
OSS challenge: how to make the community embrace this kind of
work? For the the first write it's hard, but not so hard as to claim for
actualization over time... and this arises another unforgetable issue:
money and knowledge... people use to make money with there knowledge....
since the system is OSS, there diferential on the market is knowledge...
and share examples implies to share knowledge... it's a delicate issue,
but is real and is here and now.
well, that is obviously true, but I hope that some developers are for
example employed by companies in whose interest it is to commoditize
also things a little bit more advanced than the most basic stuff in
order to get a wider usage of these features and improve their quality
by more extensive testing and sharing the cost of further development.