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Is Linux Documentation Lacking?
eldavojohn writes "A number of blog posts are surfacing that are calling out the helpful open source community on their documentation. No, not the documentation for the highly skilled technical people, but the documentation from beginner to apprentice. A two-part series by Carla Schroeder lists bad documentation as 'Linux Bug #1' and advises users to use Google as the documentation. We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date. Is it really as bad as these blogs paint it? Has it come down to using Google before a man page?"
The PHP documentation is online, and you can comment on every page. Sometimes it’s really helpful to see what other people have said about a function, how they used it, or problems they had and how they worked around them.
A static documentation doesn’t have any of this. You get what you get, that’s it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Its why I left Linux. I hate when documentation states that I install such and such program by using the standard "make" command. This means taht I have to go find a second set of documentation to remember what the make command is (RPMs spoiled me), then google the error code to realize I am missing a library, then dig over this badly written documentation trying to figure out how to install the library just to realize taht it relies on yet another dependancy that I don't have, and am just linked to a subversion library where I have to learn on my own how to debug and compile code so that I can install library to find out that the original tarball does not do the function I had downloaded it for.
Now I know that not every Linux program is like that, and this was a bad taste from about 4 years ago, but it made a BAD taste in my mouth for linux. And I had been using it since 1997. I left Linux for Vista when it was in early Beta, and now on Windows 7, and I do not regret my decision in the least.
What Linux really needs is not really documentation, but Universal Binaries (such as on the Mac) taht will include dependancies with it. I can put up with there not being much software documentation - shoot, I don't mind just messing with something, but please, don't make me hunt down half a dozen documents on Google plus a few dependancies and libraries just to INSTALL your program.
No, Linux Bug #1 is no standard for Binaries, NOT lack of documentation.