On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 14:18:03 -0500, Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Cool! I've linked to this and Elijah's similar doc at: > http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject > > Madan, did you or others look at Elijah's document when you were > working on yours? Are they complementary, or is there overlap? If > there is overlap, maybe both could be moved to the GNOME wiki and > merged there?
I took a little time to look over the this kickstart guide. It is really cool. They do have information that my guide doesn't have, though they also have lots of overlap too (despite actually referencing my guide and pointing people to it as one of the steps...?). However, I am _really_ opinionated and don't think merging makes sense in this case[1] and I am totally against putting my guide in a wiki[2]. I think what we have is two guides that are meant to cater to significantly different audiences. Cheers, Elijah [1] I think that the kickstart guide, while cool, has a totally different audience than my guide. Here's issues that I think make their guide totally different and incompatible, as well as some nit-picks about problems with the guide in general (keep in mind that I could produce a pretty long list of problems with my guide too, so I'm not trying to be mean or anything): (1) They spend time on choosing a distro and connecting to the internet (and they suggest apps like Qinternet and Kppp!?!), (2) they start introducing basic linux commands such as mv and rm--without examples; I did some introduction of commands too (with examples) but not at quite the same level--perhaps the more basic commands like mv and rm would be useful to cover but in a separate guide, (3) they wait until "level 3" (kind of like "chapter 3") to explain what Gnome is in their "Gnome Hackers Quickstart guide" ;-), (4) they want everyone to create a bugzilla account before looking at or explaining any code, (5) They suggest manually settings paths and environment variables instead of letting jhbuild do the work for you (too confusing--I had to explain how this wasn't needed to at least one person in #gnome-love already), (6) they cover what bugs and enhancements are and how to submit them to bugzilla--before getting into anything about coding, (7) they link to dozens and dozens of general references on development, some of which are *very* out-of-date, before covering anything about coding, (8) When they get to where they start covering coding at the very end of the tutorial, the start with "Every Gnome beginner should understand the basics of the Gnome project by reading Getting Started." and link to http://developer.gnome.org/documents/joining-gnome/gettingstarted.html -- that page is so out-of-date that it does far more harm than good; I convinced Murray to just flat remove it from the 2.10 release notes without a replacement due to identifying over 12 severe problems with it. [2] I think putting beginner documentation in a wiki results in all the problems I described at http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/ch01.html#dontlearn taking over the guide. I've seen it happen; wiki documentation can be great for the intermediate to advanced user but I think it sucks for writing beginner documentation. _______________________________________________ gnome-love mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love
