Simon White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There is a lot of newbie-ism in the mailing list, and a lot of things > which you nevertheless take the time to reply to, even with your > sometimes acerbic wit ;-)
What goes unsaid is that the people who read the documentation and figure things out for themselves don't post questions on the list. They're probably the silent majority, and other people reading the list get a distorted picture of what goes on because of that. You'll note that most of my responses to the list fall into two classes: 1. "Yes, that's broken, I'll go fix it" or "go look here for examples" 2. Being rude to people so that they will READ the documentation before asking questions which are answered in those docs. > I'm going to jump in here, and I want first to say that your help in the > forum and with the project is great stuff, and we all owe you a debt. It is nice to hear that from time to time. :) > Now, I know that things are not as bad or unclear as they seem from this > thread / mailing list in general. Indeed, I managed to get everything up > and running with MySQL by reading the right documentation. However, > there is an argument to make (I think) things a little clearer. As I say a lot: "As always, patches are welcome." Or, "if you find the documentation incomplete, submit more" > 1) If the documentation can be improved, then let's improve it. Some > windows users expect just a step-by-step manual to get going. > > - The only people who can be bothered to write this kind of dull > technical stuff are those who are paid to do it... > - O'Reilly mention FreeRadius in their Radius book, but it's an old > version Actually, the RADIUS book isn't bad. As for the "old version", there's a heck of a long lead time for paper books. Something like 6 months. I expect that there will be an updated edition of the book, sometime in the future. It can have more/updated docs. > 2) If there is a case (as often there is) for a RTFM, then perhaps we > can start pointing people to the relevant filename(s). We really need some kind of over-view of the documentation, and the documents need to link to each other. But there's been little time and/or patches to make that happen. > 3) If the terminology is what most screws people up, then let's either > > - Change it, as suggested by this thread, but on democratic terms from > experienced users Correct terminology will ALWAYS confuse some people. > - Add a lexicon or quick reference Patches are welcome. :) > Now, the interesting thing for me is to get wider use of OpenSource to > stop people using commercial crap which eats up bandwidth unnecessarily. > I managed to read the documentation OK and had no issues with it. It is > clear, but maybe approaching from a different angle might help. IMHO, the #1 thing needed in documentation is a LONG document explaining how to get the server built, installed, debugged, and working. The FAQ is a tiny start. > I certainly DO NOT expect you to do this, Alan. I am calling for the > community at large to perhaps take some time to dig up their notes and > write up a couple of installs, so that these references can be made > available. If you'll look at the doc directory that comes with the server, you'll see that a substantial part of it was written by me, often because I was tired of answering questions on the list. > I certainly try to put my money where my mouth is. Over the holiday > period I might not get the time, but some time soon, I will be putting > up a site with support for what I consider to be good Linux / FreeOS > stuff, and FreeRADIUS is in that group. Sounds good to me. Alan DeKok. - List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
