Fragmentation in Linux Documentation?

twilight30 asks: "While trying to figure out why a supposedly-supported SATA-II controller isn't recognized on my motherboard I thought I'd go back and visit the Linux Documentation Project's pages. It was a trip down memory lane, but I soon wondered about the state of many of the documents there. Much of TLDP is old, maybe even crufty. So, I'd like to ask what you think of TLDP.org and its 'competitors'. Do people get info from other sites or Wikis? Are people more likely to look at their distro's forums first? Are distros good enough now that TLDP is basically irrelevant? For the BSDheads, do you think the BSDs' documentation pages have lessons to teach TLDP? Is TLDP still relevant to you? If not, what would have to change for TLDP to become relevant again?"

Comments

Re:Wikis are a poor choice for documentation layou

[Anonymous Coward]

Very well put.

The documentation is one of the biggest reasons I could never force myself to stick to using Linux. I always ended up going back to Windows (which I was more familiar with, and the help system there actually provided decent assistance), and eventually moved to FreeBSD (the handbook is incredibly useful, and the man pages are full of relevant examples).

Re:Wikis are a poor choice for documentation layou

[mu22le]

Why do the "boring" part of telling people how to use it when you can set up a wiki, tell everyone that the answers are in there, and let your users write the documentation for you?

'cause nobody would write the documentation anyway.
If there is a wiki there is at least one places where info are supposed to be.
If you can't find them you can bug the programmer once and then add it so that those who will follow won't have to do it over and over again.

Benevolent Dictators Helpful

[bill_mcgonigle]

Instead of a few people intelligently thinking how to lay out the documentation for a system, you have dozens or hundreds of people laying things out according to a whim

That's terrible, unless you don't have a few people who want to intelligently write a manual. Wiki documentation is better than no documentation.

In the days before Wiki, I ran a FAQ-O-Matic. Having people do the editing was great, but I had to put in effort as a benevolent dictator to keep it neat and meaningful. Jon Howell had a great thing going, but ultimately, it was too hard to move from one machine to another, and I haven't seen a new release in years. It would be nice to have a mode in a Wiki that enforced a hierarchical structure like FAQ-O-Matic did, for certain classes of data.

It's hard to tell if the contents/chapters/index model is the right one for a manual, or just something we're all used to with half a millennium of momentum behind it.

Distro forums aren't very good.

[Short Circuit]

I'm sorry, but distro forums (Ubuntu's, at least) aren't very useful. Every time I need to Google to resolve an issue, the top link is to an Ubuntu forum. Someone's laid out the question clearly and concisely, and is either ignored, or is told "RTFM".

It bears mentioning again: The questions were worded well, with important details provided.

Re:Distro forums aren't very good.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even worse than that on Ubuntu's forums
advices are utterly inadequate too....
like a dkpg-reconfigure --all
just to reconfigure ONE package that failed....
(and reading at the man of the command won't help you to much either because then you have to know what is the package that accept the reconfiguration since the command returns nothing in numerous cases...)

of course it works.....no it doesn't really help in the long time.
Should I mention how many dummies are just advicing to change edgy to feisty in sourcelist to upgrade to feisty when the official stance is NOT TO DO that....
Ubuntu forums are NOT a good source of information when you have a problem.
They are a good source of information to know that you are not alone struggling with one of their numerous bugs though.

Agree: Gentoo Wiki is great, even for non-Gentoo

[KWTm]

I second the parent and sibling post. Many times I've had to plow through Linux docs, and consistently find straightforward answers in the Gentoo wiki. They give usable examples, and it's something that can be used by most Linux distros, not just Gentoo. Yes, there are a few places here and there where the Gentoo wiki tells you how to compile with certain flags, so that's not for me since I use precompiled binaries (Kubuntu / former Mandrake), but most of the time it's a treasure trove of info. Thanks, Gentoo wiki!