On Friday, September 15, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>
> I'd suggest that this person take the time to query (offline) people who
> ask FAQs to find out directly why they didn't find the answer they were
> looking for in the manual. That way they can find out whether or not
> the person even looked in the manual in the first place.....
>
> IIRC it was Per Cederqvist who first decided that a FAQ was a bad form
> of information presentation in this context and though I originally was
> wary of losing the then gargantuan FAQ...
I'm going to agree with this wholeheartedly. *Most* of the FAQ's asked here
are of the form "Why can't I, or How do I, do 'locking', etc". If those
people had bothered to read the manual, they would have (with even half an
IQ point) noticed that CVS advocates a copy-merge conflict resolution method,
and we would not have had their questions in this forum in the first place.
To give an example of a project where a FAQ is not really "sanctioned", have
a look at OpenBSD. Their man-pages have had sigificant work done to them.
Most of the time when somebody asks a FAQ (yes, OpenBSD has a FAQ, but it is
quite tiny in comparison to most other OS FAQ's out there) the usual response
is one of 'man question(1)', where question refers to the man-page where the
needed answer is documented.
The FAQ in OpenBSD is used more to document errata and other things that
should get fixed, and should already be fixed given an ideal world. So, if
somebody wishes to write a FAQ, by all means, go ahead. But, IMHO, the real
job lies in improving the distribution proper, including the manual, and
pointing people at specific sections of the manual, should they ask a FAQ.
With time, people will recognize the manual as the authoratative piece of
information (other that this list of course, :-) ) on CVS, and will consult
it without us needing to use the cluestick every time somebody posts on
this list...
--Toby.
