Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote: > > > if a user takes the > > > attitude that a program "should have" well-written documentation > > > designed for non-technical users to understand, and any program that > > > doesn't is somehow deficient in his eyes, then perhaps he would be > > > better served as a paying customer of a company he then has the right > > > to complain to. > > > > I completely disagree. > > Any program offered to the public should be properly documented. > > This has nothing to do with open source. > > > > No program - open source or commercial - *need* to be > documented.
It depends what you mean by "need". I follow Donald Knuth's belief in "Literate Programming" that documentation and program should go together, for the sake of the program writer as well as the user. > For open source, the market still works, and all other things being > equal, the consumer will tend to choose the better documented > product. If I am in any way typical, the main consideration in choosing software is to follow whatever is offered by the OS in question, regardless of the quality of the documentation. Personally, I would be very reluctant to consider any CentOS program that did not have an RPM in a respectable CentOS repository, for the simple reason that I might find it did not work after some update. I think the only other programs I have installed on my CentOS server are HP and Samsung printer drivers, and both of them have wasted hours of my time. > In the specific case of BackupPC, I personal would prefer that the > author (Craig) focus his time on developing the next version since > currently he is the only developer. I wasn't referring to BackupPC specifically in my remarks in this thread. The documentation is not particularly good, but it is not very bad either. "Unable to read 4 bytes" is a completely useless error message, but there are plenty of those about in Linux as in Windows. I prefer it to NetworkManager's "Closing connection (reason:3)". -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What You Don't Know About Data Connectivity CAN Hurt You This paper provides an overview of data connectivity, details its effect on application quality, and explores various alternative solutions. http://p.sf.net/sfu/progress-d2d _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
