On 15 Nov 1998, Adam Di Carlo wrote: > > But I do agree with him that the following documents should be > *scrapped* and effort directed towards improving the LDP where > necessary. Or, if not scrapped, then written as if they were an > appendix to the relevant LDP or existing FAQs, i.e., only supplying > Debian-specific information. > > Debian Tutorial > Debian User Reference Manual > Debian System Administrator's Manual > Debian Network Administrator's Manual > > I hope I'm not insulting anyone. But I just think that these manuals > are 90% non-Debian-specific, currently, and I think it's a mistake and > a waste of our time to not work the wider community on these > documents. > > Does anyone agree? >
[I'm the tutorial maintainer] The Debian Tutorial contains a lot of cut-and-paste from the LDP Linux User's Manual. I talked with the User's Manual author (Larry Greenfield) some about it. I sort of got the impression that he's not actively maintaining the document. The files on Sunsite are still dated 1997. The Tutorial improves on the User's Manual in some ways: - all the examples are specific, and work unchanged on a stock Debian system. The User's Manual is often forced to do this sort of hand-wavy "and then you do some distribution-specific thing..." bit. Most commercial books ship with a CD and use that distro for the examples. - it has Debian/GNU propaganda thrown in - it is more up to date - it is in SGML rather than LaTeX Its disadvantages include not being quite as finished, though I've almost caught up, I think... Working with LDP people would be fine with me, if any LDP people want to work on it... we'd need a scheme IMO to basically #ifdef some regions of the manual (#ifdef DEBIAN, #ifdef REDHAT). I am linking LDP stuff from within the tutorial, and they get prominent mention near the beginning as another resource. One IMO major caveat to the LDP stuff is that the default LDP license does not permit distribution of derived works. The User's Manual was an exception (which is why I could make a derived work specific to Debian). Installation and Getting Started appears to be GPL, so that is an exception too. Anyway I strongly believe that our docs should permit derived works. Since I hack Gnome a lot, I eventually (like in a year or so) want to have a Debian Default Desktop for Newbies and some chapters in the tutorial talking about that. That's something that may be totally Debian-specific and wouldn't go in an LDP manual. Besides the Tutorial, the important piece of documentation for newbies is Linux Installation and Getting Started. The problem with Linux Installation and Getting Started from our point of view is that Debian moves config files from "standard" locations, and the Debian install section of LIGS is maintained separately from install.html. I'd think making install.html into simply the Debian section of LIGS would make sense. The other problem is that installing and configuring Debian involves text editing and other things covered in the tutorial, so LIGS ends up covering a bunch of basic Unix concepts, so then you end up with a bunch of overlap and it's kind of silly. I would like to see the installation part broken out so it could simply be prepended to the tutorial, and then add a couple of configuration chapters (X/ppp/ethernet, basically) in the relevant places in the tutorial. Then you'd have a nice single document; someone could print it out, keep it handy, install and start using Debian without having to look elsewhere. But I don't really have that kind of time, so I am just trying to get the tutorial part done eventually. Havoc
