Jon,
Why do I have the feeling you are always "against"?
Is "being constructive" OUT?
Why don't YOU do that documentation work?
- Are you busy?
- Have other priorities?
Guess what: me too! We both have that same problem, but:
- I still make time for some suggestions;
- You still make time to flame everybody!
I don't have to, but since you displayed so much concern about the
way I spend my time, I am going to tell you what my priorities are.
For me, at the moment, it makes much more sense to invest on Taglibs
and possibly Struts:
- it is what I see serving better the current needs of my employer;
- it is what I can do faster and where I can be more productive;
- it makes sense to contribute them to Jakarta afterwards and my
managers will possibly agree with that.
Does this prevent me from defending or suggesting things that can
turn Tomcat into something better for me and others?
(And, for me, the documentation is no longer a big problem.)
Notice that I am not demanding this or that. I am aware that Tomcat
is (mostly) volunteer work.
But is it bad that I post constructive suggestions?
If documentation could be improved a bit, without much effort and
just a hint of method, then why not?
It is not even something fancy - just remembering to spend some extra
5 minutes of effort at the right moment:
- I suggested turning project specs and proposals that are posted
here (and in other Apache projects) into documentation in the
distribution (of this and those other projects).
Turning such postings into documentation is something very easy to do
just at the time those texts are approved... and very hard afterwards.
Even if they are not well organized, it is much better to search what
you need from a not so big list of useful documents than from a huge
mailing list archive with a lot of "noise".
I am not even asking great documentation as FreeMarker has (and it is
GPL). Just posts turned into documents with basic editing.
Why doesn't this make sense to you?
Don't you notice Tomcat documentation problems? How can you defend
that someone should read the code to understand how to configure
something?
Do you want to draw a line on what is good documentation?
Look at FreeMarker. Doesn't even have to look so nice.
Some of the things that Tomcat is said to support (like SSL, embedding
and extending Tomcat) require a load of investigation FROM EACH PERSON
that tries to use it because there is not even a good pointer on where
to start digging.
And now, the three hopes I have for you:
1. I hope you can still see the value of plain English after all that
heavy source code reading;
2. I hope that you can still respect newbies - that you didn't
already forget that you were once one;
3. I hope that this is not a revenge - that you do not want others to
learn things the hard way just because you did so.
I am learning the hard way for (already!) a bit more than a decade
and I keep trying to ease the way to others. Since you are on Open
Source for longer than me and you are supposed to know the culture
better, I am going to ask you:
- Am I wrong?
- Do you thing I should say "Read the fucking source code!!!" to
anybody that asks me about the open source stuff we use?
Have some fun,
Paulo Gaspar
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Stevens [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, January 05, 2001 23:43
>
> on 1/5/2001 2:50 PM, "Paulo Gaspar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I have already seen on several Open Source products mailing lists,
> > references to specifications written and approved before I signed
> > those lists. And then (surprise, surprise!) I am not able to find
> > them. Neither together with the distribution nor on the product's
> > site.
>
> What does that have to do with this project?
>
> > It is a mystery to me what happens to those things!
>
> Search the archives of the lists or ask the project leaders.
>
> > Again, I am talking about reasonable documentation for people that
> > want to learn and not about the unprecedented miracle of turning
> > lazy dumb asses into geeks.
> >
> > Anyway, Open Source projects are very "green" about that: electronic
> > documentation only!
> > =:o)
>
> What is reasonable to one is not reasonable to another. For
> example, reading
> the source code is more than reasonable to me, but might not be as
> reasonable to a newbie. The question then becomes: "Where do you draw the
> line?"
>
> My point being that you don't even have a piece of chalk to draw the line
> with. :-)
>
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