> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Cox [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 10:14 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Purpose of this list
>
> I think the reason repeated rtfm-style questions are so frustrating
> (for me, anyway) is that qmail itself has some of the best "newbie"
> documentation I think I've ever seen - it's all of the "do this,
> then this, then this" variety - which was extremely friendly to me
> the first time I installed qmail. Whether it was DJB, or whoever
> wrote it went to great pains to aim it straight at the newbie. I
> didn't even need Dave's excellent LWQ the first time I installed
> it - and that reflects far more on the person that wrote the
> INSTALL.* files than my mediocre prowess as an admin.
>
I'd just like to say that the qmail documentation is brilliant.
Because of that, I myself have come upon the problem of knowing more
about qmail than *nix administration; setting up qmail has been my first
task as a freebsd admin. Thus the qmail docs break down where they assume
knowledge of *nix stuff--which isn't really a fault of qmail.
However, qmail does suffer from the same issue as BSD traditionally has,
which is that everyone involved is too damned smart, so they
write in terse, dense and frighteningly useful language and get annoyed
when people have difficulty parsing the information.
<quibble>
The qmail.org page is also a bit confusing. It would be nice if the main
answers pages were organized together:
Life With qmail, the qmail HOWTO, and the qmail man pages. They're all
listed under
User-Contributed Documentation, but they're mixed along with a whole bunch
of other
more specialized links.
There's just a little bit TOO much info on the qmail.org page;
it would be nice if it were separated out a bit. I only just looked at the
"big picture"
link, which is immensely useful. I didn't click on it, because I generally
avoid
links in the middle of a paragraph if I'm looking for particular
information, especially
a paragraph with a lot of links.
</quibble>
If there were a quick meta-manual, which listed and described the
most-important
manual/documentation links, that would be extremely useful. If it exists,
then it
should be one of the #1 links on the qmail.org page.
The other section that doesn't exist (or does it? It's not easy to find) is
"Qmail for users" which would talk about qmail just from the perspective of
the *nix user, with the userland commands, without mixing it all in with the
admin
info.
