discuss: HOWTOs and Mini-HOWTOs
Subject:
Re: HOWTOs and Mini-HOWTOs
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
15 May 2002 23:16:05 -0000
Message-Id: <20020515110039.E368@lafn.org>
On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 11:53:53AM -0400, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 10:58:54AM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> >
> > Good luck convincing the others!
>
> I'm convinced :) I think it gets in the way if you are looking for
> something. Not to mention some mini's have more meat than non-mini's.
> .02
At one time, sgml format was not required for Minis. But that's
changed. There are a lot of books out there that mention the
mini-HOWTOs and people are used to it. I looked at the 1994 list of
HOWTOs and there was only about 25 HOWTOs. So then one didn't need a
category index to them. Without such an index or a search engine, the
minis help kept the main list small. One could first look at the main
list and then at the mini list.
So the reasons for having minis is mainly historical. If we were
starting anew, I would favor not having minis. But the idea of minis is
entrenched and I think it's better to keep them.
But there are serious problems related to this. It's not the minis but
it's the FAQs, Backgrounder, and Quick Reference. How many
distributions supply these with their LDP packages? I think it may be
few. So we need to either supply a documentation tree for distributions
to use or call all of these a HOWTO. I think the class: "Backgrounder"
should be eliminated.
For example, we could have ...faq-HOWTO just like mini-HOWTO. They
might be put into the same directory as the HOWTOs. Then we could also
have quick-ref-HOWTOs. I don't really like this idea too well, but it
might be one way to get the distributions to include them. It also
makes discussion easier since the word "HOWTO" becomes broader in scope.
There also needs to be a few HOWTO indexes distributed with the HOWTOs
that would index by class, category, and alphabetical. Our DB should be
able to create these.
David Lawyer
