On Wednesday 26 December 2007, Robert P. J. Day wrote: >On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Ed Greshko wrote: >> Robert P. J. Day wrote: >> > by the way, the above is still not annoyance-free: >> >> OK.... >> >> So, I gather from all of this that the existing documentation, >> links, and whatever doesn't measure up to what you need or expect. >> Would that be a fair summary? >> >> Is the question then, how can documentation be improved for the >> average user? > >all i'm suggesting is that it took an inordinately long time to figure >out what should have been a two-minute exercise. i'm guessing that, >in most cases, readers aren't interested in a long-winded overview of >things -- they just want to know what commands to run to get >something done, which is all i wanted in the first place. > >in short, what people might want is a fedora "cookbook" with tight, >concise recipes that just plain work, out of the box. if they choose >to read up later on the underlying operations, then that's their >choice. > +++++++++50 what he said. This is my main bitch too. Particularly with jigdo, the manpages suck, and you all think its a big secret as to how to make it work. Frankly I have doubts there are 20 people on the planet who actually know how to make it work the first time. Given that we have made a directory for jigdo-lite to work in, and what we want to pull, you make getting the correct starter file's url for a given download to be an unfathomable mystery accessible only to the annointed, as its not usually visible (hey fedora, are you listening) as a pullable file on the web page advertising the jigdo availability, and the correct way to spec the target path on your hardware to this starter file is always spoken/written about in an extremely obtuse way. We speak english here as a matter of having a common language, and its my native tongue, but the answers I have elicited to date may as well be written in swahili. I see 2 choices for jigdo. 1) remove it from distribution (but it promises to be a usefull tool if its ever completed, but its the Duke Nukem Forever story all over again, for what, 3 years now?) 2) support it properly, with decent docs that make sense to a reader of english. One annotated sample command line is worth 2000 words of obtuse prose. This reminds me several years ago, of a piece of a C compiler for a 'legacy' machine that needed lots of TLC. A CS student undertook to fix it via a total rewrite. But his prof made a huge mistake and gave him an A before it was quite ready so he went on to other things, and I had to do 3 more releases before it was actually usable for the biggest project I had to throw at it. That seems to be the jigdo situation. So either finish it, or put it and us trying to make it work out of our misery. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) I'm wet! I'm wild!
