At 09:47 AM 9/24/2004 +0200, Aitor Santamaría Merino wrote:
Before Rob took over HTML-Help, the help files there were (as Tom correctly complained repeatedly) info taken from MS-Help, thus useless for FreeDOS users. And I don't think it's too much of a quarrel to write a couple of HTML-files describing, for example, that there is no /INT15= option in HIMEM, and that we have instead /TEST, for example. An easy place where to find what the commandline is.
I'll be more explicit. I think it is a waste to invest a lot of energy in having _programmers_ write up more than simple bare-bones text documentation AT THIS TIME when:
- FreeDOS hasn't released non-beta version 1.0.
- People are still debugging operational problems.
- The available time of the coders and debuggers remains at a premium. And getting worse, apparently.
- Base and support utilities are a moving target as far as adding options and switches.
- End-user familiarity with many of the same options from MS-DOS continuing all the way into WinXP CMD remains comparatively high.
Plus I think any comparisons to Linux 'man' and DOS 'help' are overblown. Linux is easily ten times more complex and confusing. I use both and, believe me, Linux needs 'man' very very badly. DOS doesn't. Linux needs a lot of other things, too, but that's a whole different set of topics.
I'm all for good, extensive documentation myself, but obviously resources are tight and I think current allocation needs point to higher priority items. You get volunteers in the project who want to or are more qualified to write documentation rather than program/debug the critical to-do items, then that's a different story. For them. But as a programmer, I think I have better things to do right now with limited free time. And I bet the story is the same for several others.
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