discuss: LinuxWorld in San Francisco
Subject:
Re: LinuxWorld in San Francisco
From:
Stein Gjoen ####@####.####
Date:
17 Sep 2001 21:52:58 -0000
Message-Id: <3BA27771.40201@mail.nyx.net>
Hello,
Henry Kingman wrote:
> Hey There,
[snip]
> Spell-checking and basic editing would go a long way
How much of that takes place during the submission process?
Perhaps we could combine this by an automated reply of
submission received combined with a short list of typos as
created by one of the later, smarter versions of *spell?
When I run the spellchecker here it doesn't skip URLs
and therefore grunts out enormous and useless lists where
genuine errors might be buried in URL content.
> Fonts is a big issue--surface it and other "most popular" stuff
> on LDP homepage? Or a "most popular" page?
I am not sure how relevant that would be as I suspect people
enter by front page to look for specific topics or via a
search engine like Google using keywords.
> HOWTOs have a wide range of authorship, from the actual developer
> to someone who got it working and is sharing with a "Well, it
> worked for me, YMMV" attitude. Would it make sense to put author
> bios up front, or assign some kind of rating based on the
> comprehensivity of information?
I see various books have entries like "The author is a renowned
expert on <something> and the successful winner of <award> and
is married with two children and lives in a countryside mansion
with two dogs and a cat." However I am not entirely convinced
about the value of such. BTW that description doesn't even
remotely fit me, even if I were to borrow the neighbour's cat.
> What about a technical rating, novice, intermediate, expert?
When my Multi Disk HOWTO started approaching monster size I was
asked to and wrote a reading guide, telling what chapters could
be skipped by what level reader. Is this what you had in mind?
> Lots of out-of-date stuff
>
> Longer abstracts would be nice. The one-sentence and one-phrase
> discriptions on the index pages are pretty skimpy
We need a one-liner with haiku level terseness for the index but
an abstract should be about 5 lines or so. Briefness is always
important.
Perhaps you could list what documents could do with a tune-up?
> Better indexes would be helpful, since related information often
> appears in several places. Fonts, for example, where you have the
> font, de-uglification and X HOWTOs, and probably others, all with
> font information. Some kind of topic index would be nice.
A comprehensive classification of the documents was proposed
some time ago but I haven't heard anything recently. Does anyone
have more updates on that effort?
> More troubleshooting information for when procedures in howtos don't work
> --integrated bulletin boards
> --help forums
An automated error/comment system has been proposed. I suggested using
Freshmeat, integrating the LDP infrastructure with it. Some authors
have registered documents with Freshmeat already. I never got a reply
from the people behind Freshmeat and have not had the time to pursue
the matter.
However Debian has a working bug tracking system and I have had two
reports from there, one was just the other day.
A web based interface has the advantage of having a tiny threshold
for the users to use, writing email can be more complicated.
> Okay, that's all that comes to mind. Again, the overwhelming majority
> of comments were appreciative. It was fun to hang out in the booth,
> take all the credit, and soak up all the compliments ;-). Thanks to
> Joy for organizing us volunteers and making sure there was someone
> to cover the booth for the whole show.
Should we have a section on LDP for reports of big meetings, some
kind of log of public participations of the LDP?
> -Henry
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 02:00:06PM -0500, Joy E Yokley wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
[snip]
>>Also, I thought it would be a good idea to have some kind of handouts in
>>the booth. I am looking for ideas about which of our documents you think
>>would be good to print out and have available as handouts. A history of the
>>LDP would be great to have also if someone has something like this handy.
Those are two very good points. So what do we have in terms of
readily available material on LDP? And what was handed out during
Linuxworld? Also what do we have on the history of the LDP? I don't
know for sure when it started, was it in 1994?
>>Thank you,
>>
>>joy
Regards,
Stein Gjoen
