(trimed the to/cc line back down to just the list)
On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Patrick Goetz wrote:
> Writing documentation, on the other hand, is not fun, at least not for
> most people, so it is harder to find people who will commit a couple of
> hundred (or more) hours of free time to a documentation project.
Actually, I disagree here. I have met hundreds of system administrators
in my almost 10 years as a sysadmin. Most of them aren't particularly
good coders, nor have they needed to be. All you really need to be a
sysadmin is the ability to understand how the fundamental mechanisms of
the system work and interact with eachother, the ability to think
creatively, and to be able to explain what's going on. Hmmm... sounds a
lot like a tech writer to me. ;)
I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate the opportunity to be able to
actually contribute something to these projects. And since we have skills
almost idealy suited for playing with thing and breaking them, then being
able to explain how we broke them, and writing up the way things should
work, we would make excelent non-coding testers and doc writers.
Not that I have a whole lot of free time, but who does? I would still
like to try. (Maybe I should just check out the ldp site and see if they
already have a place for people to volumnteer for something like this, but
it might be best if people can offer their services to the projects that
atually matter to them.)
> which comes with linux is an order of magnitude better than that which
> comes with Solaris (at least - so far I've found Answerbook to be 100%
> useless), for example, so I guess that corporations are even more
Now, let's be fair.. 95% useless. There have been times when it gave
imformation almost specific enough that I was able to infer the right
answer from the crap it contained. Not often but...
Cheers.
-----
In case of fire, stand in the hall and shout "Fire!"
-- The Kidner Report
