On Thu, June 1, 2006 4:50 pm, Dave Hayes wrote: > I don't agree with thinking like a marketeer, and I'm happy people on > this project (especially Matt) think like engineers. Nevertheless it > seems to me that the barrier to entry for novice users to DragonFly > could be lowered considerably with a small amount of effort. I would > assume the best place for a focused effort is in the documentaiton. > > So. What would it take to have a simple and concise set of commands > any inexperienced adopter could easily apply to get a basic DFly > system with X, gnome or KDE, and some basic applications?
Someone writing it is what it takes. Like much open source documentation, the handbook and other things are written in DocBook, which isn't too hard to learn, but does present a slight barrier to entry. Building the handbook or similar things from CVS requires a multitude of applications on your DragonFly system. Jeremy C. Reed and I (and Hiten, early on), are the only folks that have tackled it. The wiki presents a nice alternative; it's much easier to add to. It doesn't easily allow for PDF or PS or whatever output like DocBook does. There was some discussion a few years back or so about moving the handbook primarily into the wiki, which would make it easier to update but harder to bring back into CVS. (The end result was 'no') If you want to write something up and put it in the wiki, that would be great. If you want to add something to the handbook or other documents in CVS under doc/, you can write the plain text and I'll happily do the conversion if you don't want to. I've switched jobs, houses, and (inadvertently) computers over the last year, so my docs output hasn't been what I want it to be. I completely 100% agree with you. We need more docs that are easy and quick. Even if the Handbook was up to date and revised, it'd still be quite the slog to get through.
