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Ask Slashdot: What To Do About the Sorry State of FOSS Documentation?
First time accepted submitter TWX writes I've been out of computers as a serious home-hobby for many years and in returning I'm aghast at the state of documentation for Open Source projects. The software itself has changed significantly in the last decade, but the documentation has failed to keep pace; most of what I'm finding applies to versions long since passed or were the exact same documents from when I dropped-out of hobbyist computing years ago. Take Lightdm on Ubuntu 14.04 for example- its entire configuration file structure has been revamped, but none of the documentation for more specialized or advanced uses of Lightdm in previous versions of Ubuntu has been updated for this latest release. It's actually harder now to configure some features than it was a decade ago. TLDP is close to a decade out-of-date, fragmentation between distributions has grown to the point that answers from one distro won't readily apply to another, and web forums for even specific projects are full of questions without answers, or those that head off into completely unrelated discussion, or with snarky, "it's in the documentation, stupid!" responses. Where do you go for your FOSS documentation and self-help?
I've found the only reliable documentation has been reading the source code itself. I like the doc systems where the developer writes documentation inline with the source code, and it is compiled into separate docs (like Java JavaDocs for example).
The one thing Linux really, really lacks, compared to the *BSDs is the quality of the documentation. Not even Google makes up for the deficiency.
learn how to use a program by reading the source code!
I jest, of course. It's not just open source projects that have this problem, though; plenty of commercial applications also have shit for documentation. The upside in open source being that you *can* read the source and build documentation from it, if you were so inclined.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
fix it yourself.
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Hire someone who knows the product (a starving developer?) to help you.
The best thing to do is avoid GitHub projects. The GitHub culture is all about spewing out a lot of shitty JavaScript or Ruby code really quickly, making it public using git, then never bothering with real releases or documentation or anything else that's associated with software project management.
Software not hosted on GitHub is almost always a lot better. The fact that it's not hosted at GitHub means that the developers are at least capable enough to set up their own infrastructure, or at least use a hosting platform like SourceForge that encourages real software releases. These developers aren't just about shitting out shitty Ruby or JS code snippets. They're about putting together open source software products, which includes providing regular tested releases and good documentation.
I can't think of the last time I've gone to a project hosted on its own website or even on SourceForge and had a problem finding useful documentation. Sometimes you may need to build from source to get the documentation generated fully, but at least it's there. This is totally the opposite of my GitHub experience, where I often find code with no comments at all, no documentation, and not even a readme file. It has gotten to the point where if a project is hosted at GitHub, I just won't even bother. It likely won't be worth my time trying to deal with its lack of documentation and its horrible source code.
I document my findings on the Ubuntu wiki. If more people would take the hour to write up details on what they spent 2 weeks learning, we would all be better off for it.
Back when Sourceforge wasn't a shit-heap of garbage in every possible way I did a lot of documentation for various programs. I'm not a programmer at all, but I can use the damn things and tell others how to do so as well. The biggest problems I had were ALWAYS at the hands of the developer. They'd have these posts desperately looking for documentation writers then treat us like total fucking garbage when we had to ask questions. I can't fucking tell you how many times I was told to read the fucking source, despite me being very up-front about my lack of coding ability. "If you can't figure out how to use the program then how can you write documentation?"
MOTHERFUCKER, IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT. Fuck you in your goddamn asshole you fucking arrogant fucking pricks.
I stopped bothering when I stopped using Linux, which is a story in itself. The fact of the matter is the majority of programmers are assholes that have no business operating in normal society. Lock them in the fucking closet and let them read the fucking source until they jizz all over their crusty beards while fantasizing about Stallman's brown pucker. Maybe THEN the people that make documentation will give enough of a shit to try to do so again.
The problem is most software is complex, and documentation is an attempt to simplify the work flow. But the documentation if complete would probably be just as large if not larger then the code, and just as complex to read.
What I find for good documentation is down in the FAQ, or a quick spot where you know a particular area is kinda clunky in the UI, or just a list of of the features you can use and what they do. Not a formal write up in a 1000 page book. But the appendix, and the list of tables is usually enough.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In the past, there was usually a fairly good set of manual pages that seemed to accompany most OSS projects. However, nowdays all huge portion of projects seem to just think that if they set up a documenation wiki, they don't need to do anything else and some awesome documentation will just appear.
I am saddened to say that the lack of proper, structured documentation, combined with bad experience every time I asked a question on OFSS forums kept me away from OFSS in general (and Linux, more specifically). Every year I try again and I am seeing the same results.
I know I might ask questions perceived as "stupid" but everyone's been a newbie at some point in time. Maybe it's just my turn to be one. Thing is, once I get the correct, detailed answer I never ask the same question again but I almost never get the answer, just "RTFM" and "haha noob" with the obligatory variations.
Of course, I've been trying to ask very specific questions, I've provided detailed information on my issue and was very polite myself. Still was met with smug and bile.
In all fairness, creating documentation is something that almost nobody wants to do. I get that. However, politely answering a question shouldn't be that difficult.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If the webpage for your application consists entirely of a long list of bug fixes, you're dong it wrong. This is why you need more than a programmer to make a real application. A technical writer and even a [GASP] actual UI designer can take you from amateur hour to prime time.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If all a Google search does is turn up the millions of listserv mirror sites (why do these exist) where someone, somewhere made a comment about the issue, then the time has come to drop the subject, and the project. It's not worth the time or frustration.
A huge amount of documentation for various projects like GNU groff, GNU nano, Vim, and others, have implicit assumptions that users are familiar with those tools' traditional Unix counterparts. 'man nano' for example, doesn't describe any of the keybindings for the editor, instead assuming that users already know pico. The groff documentation in places explicitly states that it only documents the difference between groff and Unix troff.
Linux has won. Most Linux users have never used a traditional Unix, and most never will.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Some years back I decided to play around with FVWM. I was astounded with quality the man pages. FVWM isn't so much a window manager as it is a window manager *kit*, with lots & lots of configuration options. But the documentation is some of the best I've seen.
I've just been trying to work with lightdm here, myself (disable guest login & not auto-fill-in the last user name) and found the same as you. The config files have even been moved and no-one bothered to mention that.
Anyway, I usually end up in some user forum or other. Luckily I haven't had many unique problems. Almost always someone, somewhere, has had to figure it out before me & is willing to pass on the info.
Writing the documentation means having to both understand the code, and be able to get laymen level detail across to a wider audience. And to do all of this usually for little or nothing. Its not in the artistic end of a coders spectrum where he is trying to create, andthe really smart people will figure shit out themelves. You have a point. Core, solid documentation used to be part of computing, if you really wanted to do something or get anywhere, your program / system would have to come with solid documentation.
Does anyone think Unix would have worked if MAN pages had not been around (I'm being very general - I know..)
On the other hand, I see lots of projects asking people to step forward and help, including the none coding parts. And it underlines that many things don't just exist on coding leet skills. If you have a project and want it to progress, Its an area that would require some attention. How much is variable.
I bet most projects would be happy to accept patches to their man pages, and files they store in /usr/doc/ if they improve quality or accuracy.
This is one of the few areas where just about anyone can contribute even if you don't code. Chances are you can still read it enough glean what the expected options are etc.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The wiki for Archlinux is pretty much the best source of information on the web for linux, as far as I'm concerned. It's valuable even if you're not running Archlinux, with detailed guides for configuration of many FOSS programs.
I have found https://wiki.archlinux.org/, the Arch Linux Wiki to be the most useful single source of information taht is generalized enough to apply to most other distributions.
As an early adopter of Linux, I too found the existing documentation appalling and started writing better documentation, which led to co-authoring RedHat/Fedora Unleashed with Bill Ball.
My advice is to contribute to the documentation yourself since it appears that no one else, including the software authors, care much about it.
But the barriers to contributing are high. You may not only need to learn about the application, but you need to learn any number of arcane editing and versioning tools, and then convince someone in authority to accept and include your changes. It's really no different that contributing code to a project and for your average writer, that's a huge hassle and likely a big part of why more writers don;t contribute.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Ask Slashdot: What To Do About the Sorry State of All Software Documentation Everywhere?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Then don't use open source. In addition to missing documentation, there is often also bugs and unimplemented features. Unless you are actually working on a project which is built upon open source components, why would you use inferior software?
There is two kinds of freedom: freedom of the source code, and freedom of yourself getting cool stuff done productively.
For YEARS there's a been a file named INSTALL_SOURCE or something like it. Indeed, there's a section on that, but a lot of the file is how to download and install precompiled binaries. It's a little thing, but it just bugs me ever time I have to skip past the stuff that shouldn't be in there to get the stuff that should.
For a product intended for use by non-techies, LibreOffice's end user documentation is horrible. It's uneven in coverage, lacks useful examples, and is generally not sufficiently detailed. Comparing MS Office's documentation to LIbreOffice's documentation should make this obvious to all involved in LibreOffice even if they, themselves, are not "non-techie end users" and think "just read the code" is a good answer. This lacking reduces the uptake of LibreOffice unfortunately.
Interestingly, the fact that MS Office code is not open forces MS to document its use well (although they probably would have anyway as MS does understand that a product is not just what the compiler spits out) - even if just so third party "self help" books can be reliably accurate.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You think it was bad then? Well, I'm not saying that it wasn't, but it has gotten a whole lot worse lately.
The neckbeards you speak of are now in their 50s and 60s. A lot of them have, I'm afraid to say, died. They didn't live the healthiest lives when young, and they have perished because of this. A lot of the others have been marginalized as we've seen the hipster tide sweep in.
At least the neckbeards had real experience. Most of them had gone to college, and a lot of them had graduate degrees and decades of industry experience. They may have been assholes at times, but at least they were competent. They wrote good code, even if they didn't always provide documentation.
The hipsters have none of this. Most of them are in their early 20s, if not younger. They have no real education. Their knowledge is extremely limited, but they don't realize this. This is why they think JS is a good programming language, for example. They have absolutely no idea about anything else. The software they write is typically total crap, and documentation is completely foreign to them.
At least the neckbeards could be depended upon to provide useful information about how their software worked. Maybe it'd take some fighting with them, but eventually the information would come out, and it would be correct. It's a different ballgame with hipsters. They don't know how the software works, even when they wrote it. When they claim to know how it works, they actually don't. So if you're trying to write documentation for their code, not only do you have to deal with shitty code (assuming you know how to), but you can't even rely on the developers themselves to know how it works, how to use it, or what it's even supposed to do.
As somebody who has contributed documentation for several neckbeard-run projects and several hipster-run projects, I would be more than happy to deal with the neckbeards any day. It isn't a good experience, but it isn't a total clusterfuck like it is when dealing with hipsters.
"Incomplete Documentation
Open Source nerds don't have the discipline to write documentation because it's no fun. Writing new code is fun. Fixing bugs in old code is less fun. Writing documentation sucks. Which is why most open source software is buggy and features little to no documentation making it useless to everyone outside of the authors".
http://www.grumpynerd.com/?p=1...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
How is this problem specific to open source? Some F/OSS docs are great, some not so great. Some communities are really helpful, some not so much. But how is that any different than the situation with proprietary software?
I'm a tech writer who has offered to help with various projects. E-mails get ignored. Support tickets get pushed to infinity. Threads get one post saying 'yeah, good idea' and yet no further action gets taken.
Oh, of COURSE you believe in good documentation.
How about crowdfunding some documentation efforts by real technical writers?
The reality, for better or worse, is that writing FLOSS code has sufficient apparent benefits for the software engineers and their sponsors to get the job done. The technical writing of good documentation does not. Whatever the reasons, it is the case; that has been the reality for decades.
But how much would it cost for a first pass at documentation? Take "Installing and Configuring MyCloud" as the example. Contact a few people who have written articles or put up YouTube videos on the subject. Let's get a high estimate; call it $100/hr, one month, three documenters, 10 hours per week each, 50% overhead = $100 * 1 * 3 * (4 * 10) * 1.5 = $18,000.
That seems do-able, and a good opportunity to develop a crowdfunded brand; a team that grows a reputation for getting projects done. Then you could offer a follow-on project to do a deeper dive on the same subject, or put together another team to do Asterisk & Secure VoIP, or whatever is next. Maybe start with the counter-NSA stuff, where there's a sudden broad interest and complex software that, until now, has been run mostly by experts.
A few thousands of people willing to kick in a small amount of money each toward a common goal; crowdfunding documentation seems like a natural fit.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Free software is....well...free. The people who wrote it don't get paid. That means they generally only want to do the "fun stuff". In my experience as a programmer, all the grunt work (error checking, documentation, well formed error messages, etc.) is generally avoided by coders until the company says "you have to do X, Y, and Z before we can ship this product and customers will pay for it. You do it because you are paid to do it. FOSS software has no such motivations so all the "not fun" stuff goes largely undone. Some free software is great. A bunch of it is garbage. Without a profit motive, why should anyone be surprised that most of it is half-baked at best.
It just works and it's well documented. I've tried Linux many times and always gave up. All my Windows software (other than the OS) is free software, and I couldn't be happier.
The state of FOSS documentation is about the same or, in my experience, a bit better, than the state of software documentation in general.
I can read the code, read english, write syntactically correct code (sometimes), but write english sentens is somehow difficult. Even more, when it's documentation which should not confuse the reader or when it's on an official wiki where language errors are not very funny :)
Because they include documentation as one of their priorities.
I find FreeBSD typically has far better documentation than the various patchwork Linux distros. A lot of FOSS projects are actually quite well documented.
The biggest problem with documentation is developers don't want to help maintain because it gets in the way of keeping their projects in a perpetual beta release state by changing things constantly.
Stable and mature software that can be properly documented = stale software that's less interesting to developers.
It's probably best to use semi-colons rather than commas in this.
Perhaps new contributors should start with the documentation, then "move up" to contributing code? Or would one more barrier to becoming a contributor merely make things worse?
Do any F/OSS projects allow you to report bugs in the documentation using the bug reporting tool?
On Debian, this is the directory which contains documentation outside of the man/info directories. Sometimes to get documentation for a package named foo, you have to install separately the package foo-doc. Debian does this to separate free software from documentation which does not satisfy its own guidelines for free software.
then quit your bellyaching and fix it whiner. Its not like they use closed source proprietary nebulous document formats. Slashdot articles have gone into the toilet.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I work on several open source projects. What I do is first get hacker-types (the people who like to take things apart, investigate further, research and learn, the traditional meaning of the word) hyped up over the project, giving it some tech cred. Then I tell reddit that my projects are awesome and point to the tech cred as evidence.
This step is important. Reddit, and similar other community-moderated fourms, are all about gaining internet points. Once those forums are secured, Stackoverflow will eventually fill up with questions and answers pertaining to my projects, and voila, documentation written.
Back when I was a wee nipper, I remember having to learn how to consult and search man pages in order to run GNU/Linux. I've found that FreeBSD's documentation is generally excellent. Maybe it's something about BSD culture, but I find that it's where idiots like myself that need good docs have gravitated.
A simple search on Google will find what you need If it isn't in the man page.
I will just wind up using proprietary software with proper documentation.
Same here.
I love the idea of Open Source, community-driven projects, and I'm happy when they provide useful software to people for no cost, and I'm happy that there are people providing competition for the big name software companies.
I'm also a busy person. If I've got work to do or something important to finish personally, then realistically the cost of buying more polished commercial/proprietary software can often be justified instantly.
That might be because it has comprehensive documentation, but much the same applies to the usual FOSS weaknesses: ease of use, or compatibility with industry standards, convenient availability of professional consultancy and training, and so on.
(Of course, I am similarly sceptical about proprietary commercial software where the documentation or ease of use don't justify the high prices sometimes asked. This isn't about FOSS, it's about whether it's worth spending real money to get a much more practically useful product.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm a rather odd duck. I did a lot of coding in college and my first job (writing software for hospitals) but have since moved to system administration/design and have a degree in technical documentation. I've written books on Linux and have documentation up on the LDP, some of which is still in use. So I've seen all the sides.
Coders are too busy writing code and making changes to what they write to give time for accurate documentation to be written. The days of "read the code for documentation" are long gone when you have multiple layers of libraries and applications to go through to find what you're looking for. This kinda worked in the days when you could fit an entire Linux install on three floppies but now that you need a few GB there's no way a single human can keep track of it all. Documentation takes time to write and get right. In the age of using github as a distribution and code changes between today and tomorrow, the documentation is suddenly invalid before it's written. Even then, it requires a lot of stupid questions asked by the documentation staff to coders who think they have better things to do.
As for TLDP there was a bunch of problems. Using DocBook was brilliant, but the toolsets were terrible to work with and difficult for people who never used SGML or XML. Linuxdoc was easier to use but really wasn't the way to go long term, especially since the tools were Linux-only and meant the tools were of limited use. Once Wikis took over online there wasn't enough enthusiasm in TLDP to convert and lead the charge.
Where do you go for your FOSS documentation and self-help?
Documenting code is different than documenting an interface. As an end user I honestly I don't bother with FOSS documentation for the most part because it's generally so bad. (Sadly non-FOSS software is too seldom much better even when it should be) While there are times when I have to dig into whatever is available, I generally don't bother with any application (FOSS or not) that I need to consult the documentation to figure out unless I absolutely have no alternative. It's sort of a quick and dirty way of sorting out what I want to use since 99% of what I do does not require deep magic. If I have to get out the manual then chances are that the application is poorly designed and will most likely cost me more time than some alternative. There are exceptions of course but it's not a bad first pass filter.
As a random example it's why I can't be bothered with EMACS despite the fact that it's an absurdly capable piece of software. (I don't like vi either so spare everyone the holy war) If I have to consult a manual to do even the most basic things in the application then it isn't worth my time. (Ctrl-x Ctrl-c to quit? Seriously?!? No thanks) I don't want to memorize a random list of key shortcuts especially for an application I'm just starting to use. Installation routines should take care of all but the most arcane issues. Applications should never require magic keystroke combinations or buried options for common tasks. Minimalism is fine but not when it hides so much that I can't immediately discern how to do a task (I'm looking at you Apple). If I need a tooltip to figure out what something does then it is badly designed. If I have to pull up a help screen (press F1 etc) then it is really badly designed. If I have to look at a man page or consult a third party reference then it is probably completely broken.
I think good documentation is important but it should never be a substitute for a well designed interface. Furthermore documentation for users (code is different) should primarily serve two purposes. 1) To get people up to speed on basic tasks with an unfamiliar application and 2) To document weird corner cases and how to deal with them. 99% of what any application does should not require special documentation. If it does then it needs to fixed until it is in a state where it no longer needs the documentation.
There is no glamor in writing documentation. You do not get any kudos for writing documentation. You only get kudos for writing good source code. No one makes you the keynote speaker at the hacker convention because you write good documentation. Maybe if they paid people to write documentation?
When I worked in a software company, the first people to be laid off were the people who wrote documentation.
I used to buy books for Linux, but it was a waste of money and time to buy and read them. By the time a book would come out for Linux, they would have replaced how the user interface worked or rewrote the tool.
This exact story could have been posted the first day I visited /. and nothing has changed nor will it change. Keeping the documentation up to date with good examples is boring work and few want to do it. A lot of open source developers do it for their own benefit and will simply say that's not their problem. Since most of it is a volunteer effort you can't make them do anything and the few who want to write documentation can't make a dent in the number of changes that should have been documented.
There are of course exceptions but they usually intersect with the kind of software that runs business critical applications where a lot of time and money is riding on it and paid developers do a lot of the work. Or you have someone who's being a bit of a nazi on it, but they tend to often get overrun by a fork that's moving more quick and dirty. Because users like to complain about poor documentation but they want the shiny new features too and there's not a few forks that's started because someone was rightly denied commit privileges.
Personally I got tired of waiting for the gold at the end of the rainbow when things would finally stabilize and get working and documented and done. It is a half-baked work in progress and if you got the time and interest to deal with it please do. I managed to make Linux work for me for about 3.5 years, thinking I'd eventually get to stop tinkering with it but despite releases coming and going fixing some issues new ones appeared and it never really settled down. I finally decided to get a Win7 license four years ago, I guess Linux is an escape option if Microsoft doesn't clue in from Win8/8.1 but I don't expect much has changed.
P.S. That's something I heard often, you tried like a 12 month old distro? Try it now, all your criticism is outdated and it's totally different and much better now. I used it long enough to know that's usually total BS.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The Postfix (MTA) project generally does not accept feature contributions without associated documentation. If an important feature is accepted from a contributor who did not document it, it is only released to users after documentation is added. Documenting new features before code is written helps one find defects in the interface or failure to handle important use-cases.
Since documentation is valued, it is in fact comprehensive. This does not mean that it is always accessible to complete novices, there is still room for community maintained task-oriented HOWTO documents. Though these are not always of a uniformly high quality, they are sometimes more accessible to an inexperienced user under time pressure to complete a narrow task.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To blow my own tiny trumpet for a moment, I've written and updated a manual to go with: http://sourceforge.net/project... for each release.
However, it isn't terrific AND I worked as a technical author for a number of years, doing mainframe software manuals. This is my main point, good manuals [mine is not] are hard and probably require equivalent effort to the software itself. The other big obstacle is that in, for example, mainframe world there is formal review process, formalised customer feedback, errata etc. etc. Also, manuals are planned as a 'set' installation, operation, troubleshooting, API etc.
I don't know a lot of my customers and can only correct things that appear in the Google group. In my case, since it's a niche. there's not very much.
Actually there's an opportunity here as well, in that non-code people could also participate in their favourite projects by writing guides. Indeed sometimes they do, but not often enough and they're fragmentary.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
You must have missed OpenBSD, then.
I know, I know: It's an exception. I just wanted to mention the best documented Free Software I've ever seen.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
I bet most projects would be happy to accept patches to their man pages, and files they store in /usr/doc/ if they improve quality or accuracy.
What you say is quite true however it doesn't really get at the root of the problem. If I ever have to consult a man page and I'm not doing something really arcane then the application interface is badly designed. No amount of documentation will ever fix a bad interface.
Then I hire him, after all writing code I accidentally use in my commercial product, and feeling being hold hostage because in a corner area it does not work, is his business model :)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I don't see a lack of documentation anywhere in the FOSS world, it's actually a lot better than most closed source software. I don't know whether you're complaining about your lack of Google-fu or the fact that software is reliant on other things. Off course, very obscure things are not well documented but that is regardless of software you use, that's when you experiment and find out what you need, write a blog post or improve the documentation yourself. But for a regular user and regular sysadmin and developer tasks, there is plenty of help available.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
How about crowdfunding some documentation efforts by real technical writers?
A band-aid that doesn't solve the real problem. Even if you did this and produced some great documentation, it would fairly rapidly become obsolete unless the software is never updated. You would have to basically create an endowment to fund ongoing documentation development. The real problem is that A) the interfaces are bad enough that documentation is even necessary in the first place and B) documentation is boring, unrewarding and time consuming to do well so nobody wants to bother.
Free software is....well...free. The people who wrote it don't get paid.
Frequently that is not at all true. Most free software is developed by professional developers in conjunction with their day job. It is released as free but for many important software projects the developer probably actually did get paid for their time. Sure there are a non-trivial number of developers who really are doing it for non-financial reasons in their spare time but the number is far smaller than most people think.
Bad documentation is not unique to FOSS. Commercial software is often just as bad.
Switch all of the info docs back to man pages. man pages are neatly organized and have all of the info in a handy grep-able format. info help pages are as disorganized as 1990's websites with their random hyperlinking. Something GNU got waaay wrong.
... and this is why the term "software engineer" is a bit of a misnomer.
Could you imagine if, say, aerospace engineers didn't document their work? Automotive engineers? I can hear the shop talk now:
"Hey, Jim, what's the recommended torque for head bolts on an '09 Madza 3?"
"What's the manual say?"
"Nothing, they didn't document that part."
Ergo, coders who fail to document are anything but engineers, cocky attitudes aside.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I think Unix (not just BSD, but I include BSD-based SunOS 4.x) documentation from the mid 90's was the best and easiest to follow.
The main thing I miss from that era is that practically everything I wanted to know could be looked up in man pages; and if not on that first man page I tried, in a meaningful see-also page.
These days, seems most software (not just Linux, but for any platform) is scattered amongst HTML-urls that point to long-gone former websites, and youtube tutorial videos.
Now you might say that much of today's software is too complex to describe in a man page --- but IMHO - that's the bigger problem. If people write complex monolithic bloat, writing pretty documentation for it is the least of our problems.
First, I wanted to link to This blog post by Steve Losh on writing documentation. I think offers some good metaphors as to why 'reading the source', even 'self documenting' source, is insufficient, though of course not everyone will agree with his philosophy.
Second, I wanted to say on the projects that I work on as a systems engineer doing new product development (as in this, not the information technology use of the term) documentation is perpetually threatened. And we usually work on comparatively well funded, non-FOSS programs. Documentation is timing consuming and expensive, and sometimes it is even customer direction to place it at a lower priority than new development. Though inevitably it makes things harder later, sometimes that is o.k. if it works better with the cash flow (saving money now only to pay more later can work if you expect to have more money later). Unfortunately FOSS software projects don't necessarily have people promising a ton of money for the documentation.
Now if only they would push such information to the upstream projects we'd be getting somewhere. Otherwise, that's just one more set of web-pages that needs to be checked.
Pretty annoying if the best way to find out about an application is to have to check the Yggdrasil archives, the Slackware web page archives, the Caldera docs, archives of the Mandrake web pages, Knoppix blogs, etc.
So there's this project which anyone can contribute to which doesn't have a thing I want. But unlike many things, this one doesn't require nearly as many specialized skills to produce, so the chances are pretty good I could make it if I cared to spend the time.
WHAT SHOULD I DO!?!?!?? Please help me, Slashdot. I need a way to feel like this is someone else's fault and I can't do anything about it. ... I guess, Slashdot being what it is, I should point out that the above does not actually reflect my feelings on the topic. I actually do contribute documentation updates to projects sometimes.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Sorry folks, we accidentally used dice.com to hire some new sourceforge developer advocates. The official slashdice HR guidelines prevent us from hiring people on dice.com (we don't eat our own dogshit) but the HRtard responsible, umm, well, was hired from dice.com. Rest assured that we're firing all of them and sourceforge will continue to serve the finest adware installers for stable open source projects t(meaning they haven't been updated since the 90s.)
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Only use open source that has good documentation; this is why I prefer BSD over Linux for servers, for example. On the desktop, the major packages I use have great docs. this article mentions some fringe desktop I never even heard of (and I'm a Unix/BSD admin and user for over 25 years and Linux user for 16), there's your problem right there buddy.
Now that server time has reduced in cost, you can add continuous integration to a project and make full documentation a requirement.
For example, here is a CI tool for KDE which tracks missing documentation at English Breakfast Network http://ebn.kde.org/
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
But especially O'Reilly because they've been doing it the longest.
for documentation i try to read what is supplied. then i go browse/ask stack overflow. then i go fiddle with the source code if i feel competent in the language and libraries used. finally i give up and suck thumb in the corner, looking for alternatives.
as for self help, for that i usually go to youporn. but there are plenty good alternatives too.
Perhaps frustrated tech writers like yourself should get together to form their own group (with blackjack and hookers) which picks specific un/underdocumented FOSS projects and "bombs" them with documentation. Self-hosted if the project devs don't realise what they're getting. Gathering professionals, enthusiast volunteers, through to helpful coders.
Eventually the group gains enough reputation that you can start to make demands of projects, in order to raise the general standard of technical/project and user documentation across FOSS projects. Likewise, tutorials, courses, e-textbooks, etc.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Where do you go for your FOSS documentation and self-help?
To be honest, my answer is often "closed source software from a company that provides documentation and support contacts."
Yeah yeah... open source rah rah read the code and fix it yourself. Fuck that. I have better things to do with my time than trying to decipher and fix some other jackass's code.
Duh.
the keybindings are in
man nanorc
This is the correct place for them if you understand man, which apparently you don't
It's funny because pico is actually more poorly documented than nano, because it make the assumption you know pine
The fact that this post is at 5 insightful tells you all you need to know about Slashdot
If it is not documented it doesn't ship. If the docs are wrong it's considered a reportable bug.
The man pages and official FAQ's are all you normally ever need.
I have to return some videotapes...
We all have our quirks ;) But I still have more respect for someone that does not descend in to a rant of #%!@&^%#$* And keeps on subject, is clear and respectful.
Just saying, it goes both ways.
We Old Grey Beards, can not all be put in the same box ;) ;)
Just like those following, can not all be put in the same box
No group has a monopoly on Knowledge, Tact or Respect. Just like no group has a monopoly on being Brash, Nasty, Foul Mouthed, Inconsiderate and Hard to Get Along With.
There are all types in all groups. And I get to choose who I associate with ;)
So I just chill out, respect others and go with flow and enjoy life ;)
Money is the answer.
If you were to give me money, I could write all kinds of words for you. Tell me all about the configuration, deployment and best practices for your system and we'll work together on some documentation.
Often the only reliable up-to-date documentation is sadly the source code itself.
I work on serveral open source projects and I agree, the documentation usually sucks. If not for the front-end application itself, then at least for the underlying libraries and such. Software documentation is often in a terrible state for several reasons:
1. Developers are busy writing code
2. Coding is more fun than writing documentation
3. Developers are idiots and somehow assume their twisted logic and UI is intutive.
If you really want to fix this problem you can do one of two things:
1. Write documentation yourself and contact developers for help, maybe offer to contribute the documentation to the project.
2. Contact the developers and offer to pay them (donate to the project) if they write better docs.
I donate my free time to open source and I almost never get paid for it. When I do receive money it is usually with a request to fix something in the code or add a feature. No one has ever offered me cash to write documentation, but I would happily do so if someone offered up the money.
I wanted to help, but tried to find a way to contribute and was defeated. Each project has special formats and needs. You can't just jump in and start writing. I hit a wall just trying to figure out what to do to get started. How does a technical writer find a project that needs help?
Is it just me, or does "tldp" look awfully similar to "tl;dr"?
Info must die. Real manpages for all the GNU tools.
For another project that has solid documentation, see PostgreSQL. Highly recommended, both the database and the documentation.
The best strategy to fix this: Let's create a new linux distribution.
Only packages with thorough documentation on each and every feature will be accepted for the repositories.
Only packages with thorough documentation on each and every feature will be accepted for the repositories.
Oh my gawd! It stopped booting!!!
Why on earth did they throw out the linux-kernel package?!?
Programmers, some of them at least can write programs. Deploying a solution requires more. Architecture, human resource management, scheduling, testing, triage, review, marketing and documentation user support and product management, for example. There are reasons there are such specialisations. Business Cases and Functional Requirements should provide use cases or stories, which inform your testing and provides the skeleton of your user manual. You do start a project/phase/update/maintenance by understanding the requirements, right? You accept the output by validating it against the original impetus. And then you describe it in something of a narrative. Whether you sprint, spiral or fall over water, this works.
Dialectician. Archology.
It's that simple. If documentation cannot be kept up to date and accurate, I cannot rely upon the software, and will not touch it period.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think that's *half* of where the problem started.
The second half is when various Linux distros started writing their "own" documentation, rather than contributing back to the upstream projects.
Once documentation fragmented like that; every damn blogger started trying to make documentation "his" to preserve his own page-rank; and a bunch of commercial Question/Answer sites saw the business opportunity of trying to own the documentation for themselves.
Once all those were in place -- it seems most of the efforts moved away from contributing documentation back to the source projects, and moved towards commercializing and monitizing "answers" - which is only profitable when the documentation doesn't keep up.
Sad.
I was really concerned about the sorry state of the Bugzilla documentation a decade ago. So I wrote first an unofficial FAQ, and then later a book called "The Bugzilla Guide" and submitted it to the CVS repository under my own copyright. A few years later when I felt it was in a reasonable state, I released the documentation to the Mozilla Foundation and washed my hands of the project. They've done a pretty good job keeping it updated; SOMEBODY has to do the groundwork to create a framework for the documentation to hang together. It's either a labor of love or a labor of money. Lucky for me in writing The Bugzilla Guide, I had both: first was paid to work on it part-time as part of my job, and then for several years with no remuneration. Eventually I stopped using the product professionally, so therefore had no need to revisit and update any further. The tale is the same for many of us, I believe. I parlayed that experience into a series of lucrative contracts that leveraged the fact that I was the guy who "wrote the book on Bugzilla". These days, I have largely stopped doing contract work on the basis of that anymore; my full-time job -- that, not coincidentally, involves writing a lot of documentation! -- is way too interesting for me to spend more time on that :-)
So in short: find a personal or professional reason to use a product and write the docs. If you don't do it, who will?
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
I wouldn't say that today's software is too complex for man pages but instead man pages have never really been ideal for the tasks for which they're used. Software has always been complex. Man pages might have been appropriate for some short window of time but technology quickly left them behind.
Man pages do not have an effective system of hyperlinking, indexing, or even searching. They were meant to be read on a teletype or printed on paper. For documentation any more complex than instructions on how to use console commands they are completely inadequate. Even for looking up instructions on console commands they're less than adequate because there's no sort of authoritative hierarchy, if you don't look up the exact right term man won't point you to the correct documentation (or best guesses).
Besides man being inadequate it is difficult to write proper man pages. This is just adding insult to injury as it makes it less likely that developers will write even bad documentation.
Of existing documentation systems I'd most like to see GNU Info become the primary documentation mechanism for FOSS. It solves most of man's problems without introducing its own new ones. Even GNU Info isn't perfect and could use some improvements.
I don't disagree with the idea that FOSS desperately needs some reliable offline documentation. This idea might require that FOSS distributions themselves maintain their own documentation. The Arch wiki for instance is fantastic, it's some of the best Linux/Unix documentation around. While the Wiki is great it would be really nice to see this information turned into texinfo/manpage/whatever files so everyone could have good references and not need access to the internet.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Yup. And that's been the other part of the problem, poor versioning on the writeups that are out there, so there's a bit of research just to see if this document even applies to the project, package, and version that you're trying to work with. Since I was working with video, notorious for knocking down the local console to the point that a reboot is required, I decided to set up a serial TTY so that with my old laptop I could serial-console in. In the process I found instructions for configuring the bootloader to also use the TTY interface, but while Grub2 is better documented than a lot of projects I still found some erroneous documentation for Grub2 and some now-useless documentation for the first-generation Grub as well.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
As software development accelerates it's going to become more and more difficult to justify documentation for the simple reason that it goes out of date almost immediately. Rigorous design principles are great on paper, and you can take rigid software designs directly to the documentation, but software design is something that only really happens in academia and big software shops with specifically targeted customers. For everyone else documentation is development drag - it's a slowdown and everyone hates doing it.
I write great manuals and sell them as e books.
Being paid to document by the most enthusiastic users is the way to go.
I spend a lot of money on books. O'Reilly, Packt, etc. put out some very useful books documenting FOSS tools (and for statistical computing in R, both Springer and CRC publish a lot of really excellent books, although they can be very pricey). These books are mostly written by people who can really write and edited by people who can really edit.
And when I spend my money buying this kind of documentation, it supports a culture of good technical writing and ensures that good technical writers to get paid for their work.
It might be nice if there were a similar quality of documentation available for download under CC, but absent that it's nice that there is a thriving industry providing good, useful documentation in books.
[First half: Info replacing man.]
[Second half: Distro-specific Linux documentation explosion and lack of upstream transmission.]
And the THIRD half: The X windows system dumping every little subroutine interface into the man pages, with names that collide with unrelated non-X features, so the "apropos" command became buried in junk. B-b
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't think Linux installs man pages anymore, they replaced them with a search engine for random forum posts and askubuntu questions.
Write the docs. Make them great. Pester those who know what you don't until you've figured it out. Set the example for everyone to follow. You're a leader. Lead!
> Now you might say that much of today's software is too complex to describe in a man page
It is not. The problem is cowboy software development where people find pleasure in hacking out something but hate to do documentation. It takes discipline and rigor to do documentation. But, I think if we had better tools for creating documentation that would go a long way to improving the situation. Make it dead-simple, even "fun" (some kind of gamification perhaps?) to write docs and we'd have a better chance of getting developers to write down WTF is going on.
I just live with software that's between 2 and 5 years out of date and don't upgrade often. After using something for a year or so, the UI gets familiar enough to live with.
Experiences so far
- XFCE is the best desktop environment ever.
- about 10 percent of websites, fail to render correctly, and are unusable.
- pam is too complex for mere mortals to understand.
I think they are all niggers, at least honorary niggers.
Might require that FOSS distributions themselves maintain their own documentation.
I rather the distributions stay away from this -- or at most just passed whatever documentation they do add to the upstream projects.
IMHO the biggest *problem* now is that you often have to got to Red Hat's manuals, or to Arch's or Ubuntu's wiki, or to Gentoo's mailing list, etc. to find documentation to anything.
Seems like that means you have a half-dozen competing efforts that all are re-envengint the same documentation; and since many of those distros are commercial enterprises, are motivated not to share and to paywall off their investment. Ugh.
Documentation could improve a lot faster and better if some company took the time to setup a Wikipedia-type "Linux Encyclopedia". Everyone could get at it and improve it in waves in the very same way, and it would unite stuff that's scattered hither and thither.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Are you reffering to copyright or patents? Second are monopolistic, true, but copyright is not monopolistic at all: it allows for remixes, and implementations that do something the same way but are not just a simple copy.
Defective? Please name a better model. Current implementation has certain issues (terms too long for both patents and copyright, strongly national, problems with alternative models like open content, penalties far too high), but the principle itself isn't broken.
Why is it a "tyranny over the mind of man"? I'm not reffering to DRM or trolling patents (almost all software patents are trolling or defensive-trolling). I think copyright creates incentives to create Intellectual property. Would an author write a book when he knew he wouldn't get any money from its sales? Would you put research money into a drug when your competition could copy it the moment you release it to the market? What are your ideas to redesign these systems?
Each software project should set up it's documentation on a semi-wiki. That is, a web page where the current documention is readable but is unwritable, but below it are proposed rewrites, corrections, comments, quiestions, etc entered by anyone. This way the documentation can be rewritten by the users overtime, and when release time for the package comes , the best additions of documentation become the new canonical version released with the product, and take over the unwritable version at the top. Thus, when you read something you don't agree with in the documentation you can contribute on the spot, like any wiki. Plus it's vandal-minimized.
When I find a problem, I fix it where possible, and at least bring it to the attention of relevant people where I can't.
If people actually did this, instead of complain that "the docs suck" and expecting someone *else* to do the work to fix the issue, the docs wouldn't suck.
If whatever it is uses some particularly arcane and awful docs build system I'll often just send in textual changes. If it uses something sane, or something insane that I already know (docbook for example) I'll send a patch.
This is a case of JFDI.
Agreed. You can produce good docs without the solid co-operation of the dev team, but it's much more difficult, more time consuming, and a lot more frustrating. They also tend to bit-rot a lot faster.
The problem is that the development process is backwards. Writing a mountain of code and then trying to document it after the fact is stupid. It would be easier to get both aspects of the software (code and documentation) to match if you wrote the manual first and then wrote code to behave the way the manual says it should. We already do this for ourselves when we flow chart an algorithm or do pseudo code. We already frequently make use of "contracts" to define code functionality before the contract is fulfilled. How much harder would it be to go up one more abstraction layer and write those behavior contracts in plain english?
To our glut of Unemployed English Majors.
If LibreOffice were produced by a division that pulls in $20 Billion a year the documentation would be pretty damn good. Luckily, I work almost exclusively with plain text and have no need for any "office" software.
I'd rather have good docs and bad tools instead of tools that claim to be ready for users that are poorly documented. I have just experienced yet another instance of bad documentation and indeed how developer choices contribute to both poor documentation and poor software.
FOSS and Linux eontail a lie. It is somewhat like a social media lie that a community can arrive at quality products just by the need they express and the solutions they generate. I have been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and my 12.04 just fell off the end of the repos, The means I get the "Untrusted Package" nonsense from the Soiftware Center for any new package I try to install. This is Cannonical's sneaky way to telling you that your need to reinstal; it isn't a matter of upgrade because the next rev. they allow you to use is 12,10, and that is not supported. Now this would not be so bad if they allowed /home to be in its own partition by default, but they don't help you with that. When Ubuntu installs, it needs a swap partition, so why can't it ask if there is a separate /home or make one?
There is a FOSS tool called recordmydesktop that claims to do desktop video capture with sound. It fails to capture sound at all on U. 12,04 and 14.04 installs I have. The documentation is a night mare because the program has a lousy interface is was a hacked command line tool with many many options, To get into sound on most Linux systems is a nightmare again because of complex command-line options. It is very hard to figure this stuff out and the way FOSS works if it gets on the Debian repositories it is propagated everywhere, Ubuntu, Mint, etc., etc., with no standards for utility and quality of documentation. That is why FOSS and Linux suck and suck even more as time goes on. My eyesight is failing and to read complex man pages and use command-line options is literally getting to be a pain. I am convinced that much of this is unecessary and is due to geeks not finishing what they started or not really dealing with proper choices in the first place.
Go to You Tube and look for a video that came from the SciPy 2013 Conference from Austin Texas entitled something like "Write Buggy Software". This describes the problem very well and the challenge not met by developers to write simple tools first and use bug reports to tell them who their users are and what they expect from the tool. Too often especially on the Debian repositories I down load something to try that disappoints because it either does not do what it claims or it is too complex to use. The developer has lost the forest for the trees because the underlying driver environment was buggy or he added too many choices each one of which multiplies the chance for bugs. He becomes overwealmed, having bitten off too much, and walks away, and yet the software remains on the repositories.
I am seriously consider leaving the world of Linux, I have used and managed early UNIX systems and nearly all Solaris systems, so I am not afraid of the command line. I just think that the systems ought to be more robust and easier to maintain in config. I am seriously thinking about getting rid of all of my Linux installs and getting a Mac as my main desktop. I have had a Mac before, OS X 10.4, Power PC Mac Mini, but that is a white elephant now, but I may get a current Mac Mini or a Macbook of some kind. The reason is that UNIX and BSD are still under the hood, and FOSS stuff installs there, I can get a Terminal when I want to use the shell, all true, but the big plus of OS X in my experience is that Apple has assured that an application it supports will install and configure reasonably on its hardware. My hint to Apple is that you can undercut poorly supported Debian derivative Linux installs by cutting the cost of Mac hardware by one half. Then it would become an attractive alternative to Linux and Microsoft Windows, and that the way in is that support of apps on a stable platform.
I was going to post about the FOSS documentation being better than the software from commercial offerings. While MSDN for developers is often pretty good, when it comes to registry changes needed to make Windows sane, they are often very poorly documented.
But then I saw this was about Ubuntu - a commercial entity - making private changes to FOSS software, and including the documentation for the standard version.
This does not conflict with my view that FOSS documentation is better than documentation from commercial entities such as Microsoft or Ubuntu.
Obvious solution to poor documentation: don't read it!
.
There's a lot of decent, good and even excellent documentation to read too, after all. Why would anybody read the bad documentation instead?
I think today many people utilize either realtime chat/IRC etc or email lists or even facebook to share or exchange info on how to do things, solutions to bugs or misconfigurations etc. Look at YouTube and how immense the number of training & how-to video's are there now on anything from OpenStack to LXC.
The answer is obvious and unlike non-FOSS it is doable.
How about an Ask Slashdot, What to do with the sorry state of MS documentation?
Oh yeah, the answer is nothing, suck it up MS fanboy.
As someone else already pointed out, doc writers for FOSS projects tend to be technical-minded early adopters who are either developers themselves, or who spend a lot of time with developers. That's how I got my own start, and it has come with the dual problems that my writing is too technical for Joe User on the one hand, and on the other, when you start documenting new software, you find a LOT of bugs. If you have any coding skills at all, it's faster to go fix the bugs than wait for someone else to do it, and that's how doc writers morph into developers morph into project managers. I haven't updated my documentation in almost 10 years, because only so many hats fit on my head at one time.
As a project manager, the problem I've faced is that I have dozen of peoples who loves my project and woulds liking to help in some way to be part of the team. These generous peoples is wanting to help very muchly, but they isn't writing so good in English, because they isn't talking English as first language. Really interesting it is getting when collaborating are peoples from two very distinctive language background who makes error in strangely conflicting way too. Resulting is documentation need to be heavily edited, to the point of rewriting everything. Them peoples is nice, but they isn't no use writing nothing.
It has been a really frustrating ride over the years. We could do better on documentation if I took the time to sit down and go through it all, but if I had that much time, there are so many more critical things to deal with first. What it all amounts to over the span of almost 15 years is a slow process of attrition and collapse where more people leave than join, and more and more unfinished work piles up everywhere.
It is what it is. If you don't want to deal with all this, go spend $1,000 on some commercial stuff.