On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 21:37 -0600, Charles Howse wrote: > I'd like to start a calm, respectful, reasonable discussion of the reasons > that we tell people to RTFM, or reasons that people don't get their > questions answered on mailing lists and usenet groups. When I first started using Linux, there were several times when I tried to RTFM but completely failed. Often it was because I simply did not understand the manual. This was with ppc so people were kinder because it was a smaller group, some people like ppc David Gatwood took time to help me out while a few others did tell me to RTFM - and that's probably what kept me in Linux. Documentation is a mess. Many cli binaries don't have a man page, some man pages say look at the info documentation, some w/o man pages aren't even adequately documented in /usr/share/doc/package, many gui apps don't have scrollkeeper documentation, yelp doesn't display man or info (it use to), tetex has its own documentation system separate from man/info, documentation on the web is sometimes outdated or distro specific or wrong or bad advice, etc. When documentation is a little better on the desktop (searchable man pages and searchable scrollkeeper, less documentation systems that the documentation might be stored as, etc.) there will probably be less of this issue. I personally think every CLI executable in /usr/bin should have a man page, and every GUI app should have scrollkeeper documentation. yelp should support man pages (and perhaps an FAQ) and yelp should be searchable for all documentation it supports (not just the find widget that seems to only search through what it is viewing). Plugins for yelp to allow it to extend to other documenation systems that really can't be done via man/scrollkeeper (like tetex) would be nice too, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
