discuss: History of LDP
Subject:
History of LDP
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
15 Jan 2016 05:50:39 +0000
Message-Id: <20160115055133.GA4160@daveslinux>
I think it's about time to update the history of LDP and perhaps be more
honest about it. I was sent to the Montreal expo in 2000 and almost
everyone visiting the LDP booth there complained about our documentation
being out-of-date. After that, the problem only got worse except that we
started reviewing docs more which improved the quality of some docs.
My view is that we made a big mistake by going with DocBook. Part of this
was my fault for being partially ignorant of the situation along with our
leader, Guylhen, also not understanding it and thinking that one could
simplify DocBook by using only a subset of it. I was somewhat of a coward
for not being more strongly opposed to DocBook.
Do we have good archives of the "discuss" list that one can search with a
search engine? I kinda doubt it. I don't think that Google has the
archive in it's index either since I've done some test searches and come
up with nothing. But I've saved most of my outgoing emails so I have some
info to use.
Publishing ones work on ones own website is not always a good idea, unless
there is someone available to take over the doc if the author is no longer
able to maintain it. And this happens a lot. People get busy with other
activities and sometimes even die.
One project for ldp is to find good linux docs on personal websites and
suggest they submit them to LDP. The history should include not only what
LDP did but what it failed to do. One was to create a content management
system which would allow authors to request that someone else maintain
their doc.
One question I have is why around 2000 a number of women got involved with
LDP and then bowed out. Did Joy Goodreau, who worked for IBM, have
anything to do with this. She tried to improve our documentation, partly
by writing stuff on how to write and formulated a bunch of rules, etc. but
most people who wrote for LDP don't want to spend much time studying this
sort of stuff.
Another was the wiki problem. People would be more likely to edit docs if
one could just do it without registering. But it takes a lot of effort to
stop spam, including blocking ranges of leased urls that generate spam.
If ldp couldn't find the people to deal with this, perhaps ldp shouldn't
have a wiki. But ldp could have tried to evaluate non-ldp docs,
especially ones on Linux in Wikipedia. The problem with Wikipedia is that
it doesn't allow the original research which some HOWTO's contain.
Most important of all, ldp never came out with any plans to organize linux
documentation in general, and this would involve trying to minimize the
duplication of effort that happens when various linux distributions write
documentation on the the same topic.
Another question is: was not Poet (who advertised his business on his
linuxdoc.com site which also mirrored linuxdoc.org) when he said we should
accept docs in html? Who needs the other formats? If one needs text,
it's trivial to convert html to txt. Accepting docs in html also means
accepting docs in a format that generates html (linuxdoc, wikis, docbook,
etc).
David Lawyer
