KTorrent Manual

[James Tyrer]

On 07/10/2012 05:28 PM, Duncan wrote:
> Burkhard Lück posted on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:24:16 +0200 as excerpted:
>
>> Am Dienstag, 10. Juli 2012, 21:20:46 schrieb Sian Mountbatten:
>>> This, apparently, is some kind of joke, because the manual consists of
>>> a list of features, and that's all.
>>> Does that mean that no manual has been written?
>>
>> Yes.
>
> Concise answer, correct AFAIK, but not very satisfying for those of us
> who like a bit of detail...
>
> Here's the deal.  Free/libre (free as in freedom) and open source
> software (FLOSS) is in an interesting situation in regard to
> documentation.  Much of it is done by volunteers, and documentation kind
> of falls between the cracks.
>
> Those who write the code and share it with us may be quite good at
> coding, but many aren't so good at documentation.  Coding is their
> interest so what they tend to do when they have free time to volunteer.
> Besides, the people writing the code aren't normally the best to document
> it anyway, as they're too close to it, and most of it seems intuitive to
> them, since they wrote it the way they thought it.

Well not exactly.  Those that write the code need to write the actual 
documentation.  That is not the same as a tutorial style manual that 
explains to a user how to use the application.

The problem is that there isn't really any place for this documentation 
of the KDE project.

> That leaves users.  But there's a problem there as well.  Either users
> don't know enough about how it works to write the documentation, or by
> the time they do, they no longer need it, so it's not so important to
> them.
>
Yes, and that is my point.  A user that is skilled in writing can only 
write a good manual if full documentation is available to use to do so.

I am fairly good at technical writing, but, no matter what style I write 
in, I can not do so without the documentation.  I am a programer so I 
could deal with terse and/or rough documentation, but there is no good 
way to deal with no documentation.  This is why my tutorial on how to 
install KDE from source has not been redone -- the outdated one was deleted.

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch
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