Re: Tech Docs and Consultants

On Wednesday 16 April 2003 00:28, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Folks
>
> <Tirade Warning>
>
> > - Requiring submitters to understand CVS. But honestly, I'm not sure
> > about the quality of any tech document written by someone who doesn't.
>
> Aha, now the "geekier than thou" attitude comes through.
>
> One of the things that we could desperately use for TechDocs, for example,
> is an article like "Creating An OpenOffice.org Mail Merge document from a
> PostgreSQL database."   In what way does the author of such a document need
> a knowledge of CVS?

Nops. Not at all.

> Pardon my tirade, but I've been seeing this attitude not just from Scott,
> but from lots of people on this list and on -Hackers as well.   The
> attitude is "If you're not a top geek, we don't want you in our club."  The
> problem with this attitude is that top geeks only constitute .0002% of the
> population, and only about 5% of the software developers.

I would rather put it this way. You don't know CVS, fine. Create a document in
a standard software. Anything that supports, header1-header3, table of
contents, lists and bullets and some images is enough. A group of person will
take care of publishing the document.

Does not sound biased in any sense. Does it?

I suggested latex/lyx beecause I found that it offers maximum amount of
productivity with minimum external dependecies. If there are any other
choices which are a portable and easy, I don't mind, as long as they satisfy
basic requierments I mentioned above.

I am replying to this post after I finished all the threads on this topic.
Frankly I am not sure what is the final decision. All I know, is I want to
contribute. Please tell me how can I do it. I would like to undercommit and
overperform, to make sure that I do what I would commit.

Thanks.

 Shridhar