William L. Maltby wrote:
So what's GNUsworthy about that? Same old problem new millenium. Unlike taking a crap, folks don't care that the job's not done until the paperwork is complete. And since it's an unstructured, "do what you want to contrib" effort...
I guess we're getting off topic, as this is hardly a CentOS only problem. But... documentation is a perfect example of where commercial entities can really help. Companies like RedHat can and do pay people to go through the drudgery of writing docs. And, to be fair, things are *much* better than they used to be. Today, you can pretty much count on being able to "man zwonkumd.conf" and get some documentation on that config file. Back in the RH 6.x days, I remember that was a rarity.
It wouldn't hurt, though, if more projects would take the "Until it's documented, we won't advertise it as a feature" attitude. I believe that Debian has such a policy about their distro.
Thing is, though, we CentOS users have little right to complain. Paying RH customers do. But we can hardly fault Johnny and gang. We have no recourse but to ask "Why hasn't someone documented XYZ?". To which the answer is the perenial "Because no one has cared enough to do it. Hey why don't *you* do it after you get it all figured out?". Which is always pretty irritating, because it is so true.
-Steve