[CentOS] shadow file question

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