Re: [Sks-devel] and the next thing...

[Chris Kuethe]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Robert Urban wrote:

> Thus, I am again reduced to trial and error to figure out how to do
> things.  How about putting documentation at the top of your TODO list?

How about *you* put documentation at the top of *your* TODO list. This
is Open Source, where programmers write things that solve their problems.
If you look at how sks came to be - by way of Yaron's thesis work - you
might see that to Yaron, documentation is less of a priority. It seems
that documentation is a high priority to you, and your submitted docs
will no doubt be appreciated by those who follow.

Code, docs, whatever all seem to be of better quality when their creator
is actually interested in the work. You've already done 75% of the work
for documenting some of these things via trial and error by posting your
findings to the list. If it's that big a problem to you write a faq or a
new document and submit a patch.

You're probably wondering who violated my cornflakes this morning; I'd
like to point out that on plenty of other projects I've hacked on, new
code or patches are taken much more seriously than feature requests or
simple bug reports. There are a number of software packages and hardware
devices that have slightly better documentation because rather than just
saying "page foo, paragraph bar is wrong" I sent diffs and justification
for my proposed fix. We're not saying that documentation is bad; just
that not all (any?) of us have the time or desire to work on that right
now.

CK

--
Chris Kuethe, GCIA CISSP: Secure Systems Specialist - U of A CNS
      office: 157 General Services Bldg.    +1.780.492.8135
              address@hidden

     GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?