question about documentation

Mike Brodbelt m.brodbelt at acu.ac.uk
Tue Oct 10 16:20:25 GMT 2000


gcarter at valinux.com wrote:
> 
> 
> My point is that if there is a standard skill set that
> is more widely available, we might want to think about
> using that for the following reasons:
> 
>   o It provides an easier way for volunteers to jump
>     in and help out.
>   o We get to leverage off the current skill set available
>     in the Linux community
> 
> Of course, this is only my personal opinion. :-)
> Does anyone else feel that this is a valid point?

Definitely. I'd be interested in helping with documentation, and YODL is
something that puts me off. I would not dispute that it's not difficult
to learn, but, nevertheless, it presents a barrier to entry. Given that
I have only a finite amount of time, I need to choose how to spend it.
Learning a documentation style that I will probably never use outside of
Samba docs won't necessarily stop me from contributing, but I'll grumble
:-). If the formats were the same as the LDP, then I'd begrudge the time
spent far less, as the skills are far more applicable outside the
confines of the Samba project.

All the arguments that YODL is easy to learn are doubtless correct, but
nevertheless, it *does* require time to learn it, and is less generally
used. I'd personally be happier learning something that might be harder,
if I knew that the skills would be more useful afterwards. It's
doubtless easier to learn languages other than C, but everyone (in the
free software world at least) is interested in C, because it's
ubiquitous (among other reasons).

Mike.




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