discuss: Thread: asking for help

I just read on an other list an idea we could share: add on any free
licence HOWTO an advice asking for help for the LDP

what do you think? we lack desperately help.

We have pretty frequently people proposing help as technical writers,
but with very few actual result, I beg what people think of technical
writer is far from the reality of the work :-(

jdd
-- 
jdd for the Linux Documentation Project
http://wiki.tldp.org
http://www.dodin.net
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1412160445

Hello,

I'm a technical writer. I'm also a hardware design engineer (BSEE, Ohio State University, 1977), a system architect, and an experienced programmer. I maintain my own Red Hat server and am trying to transition from passwords to cert-based authentication. As part of my learning process, I've privately documented some of the PAM .so modules for which documentation is missing, spotty, confusing, poorly worded, or has simply lagged behind development; however, some of my documentation is based on my notions of best practices regarding code that I think a thoughtful programmer would write rather than on the code that has actually been written.

From what I've read in the lists, in TDLP documents, and in man pages, I assume that many of the prime contributors are either French or Germans who write in English as a second language. I took French in high school and can help there too.

Some of the people with whom I've been in contact are Thorsten Kukuk and Peter Hernberg.

I gave up attempting to become a contributor. Putting it frankly, I can't afford the time required to learn PAM at the source code level and I will not volunteer to start a large documentation project without access to the developers. I have questions and I have documentation that needs to be proofread for accuracy. Lacking access to developers and assurances of ongoing support I simply can't become involved.

This has been one person's experiences with the TDLP. You're mileage may very.

Ciao -- Mark Filipak

jdd-tldp (gmane) wrote:
> I just read on an other list an idea we could share: add on any free
> licence HOWTO an advice asking for help for the LDP
> 
> what do you think? we lack desperately help.
> 
> We have pretty frequently people proposing help as technical writers,
> but with very few actual result, I beg what people think of technical
> writer is far from the reality of the work :-(
> 
> jdd

Le 14/12/2009 19:52, Mark Filipak a écrit :

> Some of the people with whom I've been in contact are Thorsten
> Kukuk and Peter Hernberg.

may be you can be of great help!

Peter Hernberg seems to be the author of the

http://wiki.tldp.org/User-Authentication-HOWTO

and he set the licence with:

* Any translation or derived work must be approved by the author in
writing before distribution.

so we can't change anything on the document.

Can you either

* give us Peter coordinates so we can ask him to make his licence free
* ask him directly!

* may be proof read this doc and say if the doculent is still uptodate
or not (last update 2000)

We can help porting the HOWTO to the wiki for more convenience

sincerely
jdd

-- 
http://www.dodin.net
http://valerie.dodin.org
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/04/13/people-of-opensuse-jean-daniel-dodin/

As previously said, I plan to add a call for help in any write
authorized HOWTO (on top).

The notice have to be short and well written. So I need help :-)

Here is a first draft. Please comment and edit.

http://wiki.tldp.org/Asking%20for%20Help%20in%20HOWTOs

We will also have to make a better member page (and front page)

thanks
jkdd
-- 
http://www.dodin.net
http://valerie.dodin.org
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/04/13/people-of-opensuse-jean-daniel-dodin/