Re: quo vadis, docs

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

[Let me preface this by saying that I respect the work the doc team
has done, but given that their goals were to help users, I think we
can best respect their work by asking the real and hard question of
whether or not the docs, as they currently stand, are helping users,
and not just glibly dismissing that question out of hand.]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
>
>
> Dan Winship wrote:
>> Dave Neary wrote:
>>>> - Should we just ditch the docs and declare the UI self-explanatory ?
>>> Definitely not.
>>
>> Why not?
>
> Because (a) the docs are pretty good, merely outdated,

That statement just can't be true. Outdated docs not only don't help
users, they *actively confuse* users. If they don't help users, and
actively confuse, they are not 'pretty good' in any meaningful sense
of the word, since one measures good docs by whether or not they help
users, not by whether they helped users c. GNOME 2.2, or by how
comprehensive the confusing coverage is.

> and (b) it would
> send a terrible message about the priorities of the project.

Depends on how you did it. The message could be 'our software is so
easy to use it doesn't need docs', which is a pretty damn good
priority. Or the message could be 'we know our limits.' Or it could be
'we don't want to insult our users by pretending the docs, in their
current state, are useful.'

Luis