No it's not a catch 22. I will clarify what I was saying in my other statement. People have exactly 2 choices when faced with a problem such as documentation. The first one is to say, "Boy this product is too hard for me to learn and there isn't enough documentation, so I'll go find something else." The second option is to say, "Boy this product is hard, but I really think it could help me on my product so I will learn how to use it and ask questions on the list. Then, because I had so much trouble starting, I will recontribute back what I learned to the project." No one is forcing anyone to do anything. That's the beauty and bane of free software. In order for it to be free, someone has to invest THEIR time to provide you the free software. If you don't like it, you can move on without losing a monetary investment. The bane is that because the contributers/developers aren't usually getting paid, they have to have other jobs where they make their living. To demand that they make sure you get the documentation that you want rather than keep up with regular features for others that don't need the documentation isn't fair either. Others like me have been fine without the documentation, so the question is more why have some succeeded and others failed?
It's a big short sighted to even assume that someone would say, "Go pour through the source and write documentation." That's also quite a bit overly dramatic. If I had to pour through source in order to learn how to use Maven, I would have sucked it up and moved on. Once again I reiterate, if you take it step by step then you will be fine. Ant is NOT any easier to create a build system with. For non multiproject builds, there is no reason that someone shouldn't be able to read the getting started and have a webapp up in a few minutes. I had a webapp archetype built and up with minutes, and that's enough for just a regular website. All you do then, is add your pages and content. If you need more, then add a bit at a time. Then if they don't understand how it worked, go ask questions. Simply complaining solves nothing and makes the people doing the hard work feel unappreciated because the product they are giving out free just doesn't seem to be enough to make people happy. If they had the time to really beef up the documentation, then I'm sure they would but there is only so much you can accomplish with limited time. No problem Larry, constructive criticism is great feedback for a project and no one should ever be afraid to give it, but I see all way too much people complaining about something that people put hard work into without giving any sort of solution on how the problem could be rectified. How can you expect someone to fix something if you cannot come up with a solution to the problem yourself? This is also besides the fact that not everyone seems to have a problem getting started. I've seen people get tripped up on instructions that were written so a baby could understand them. There is no guarantee that if they invested the time writing all this documentation, that people wouldn't still have questions. People would then start complaining that the documentation isn't kept up to date or it "sucks" because it's not enough for them. People are rarely ever satisfied no matter how much you give them. On 9/24/07, Larry Meadors <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Isn't this sort of a catch-22? > > People are saying "I don't get maven, it's too complex." > > Now it's time for them to give something back and document it? > > How do you propose they do that? Start at the source and pore through > it to explain it? Saying that is sort of a cop-out, IMO. > > I think that the problem is that we have "maven in 5 minutes" and then > the rest of the docs assume that people are experts with it - the 2 > books mentioned earlier are useful, but I think people want something > more approachable and contextual. > > One other thing is the navigation - I find it very difficult to get > around the maven site in any meaningful way. There are many > inter-dependent concepts and components, and each area's documentation > assumes that the reader understands the other areas. For a beginner, > that is rarely if ever the case. > > I'm not trying to add the rants, just provide some constructive criticism. > > Larry > > > On 9/24/07, Michael McCallum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tuesday 25 September 2007 01:10, Ryan Moquin wrote: > > > If people are build their core infrastructure around Maven to the > point > > > where they feel like they should give the project developers a hard > time > > > due to something as simple as documentation, don't you think then that > it's > > > time to contribute? > > I concur wholeheartedly... > > > > -- > > Michael McCallum > > Enterprise Engineer > > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
