On March 29, 2009 12:21:20 am Martin Schlander wrote:
S�ndag den 29. marts 2009 05:16:57 skrev Richard:
One thing you are right about though, if NOBODY (including the developers) step up and do the documentation, it is a pretty sure bet that the project, KDE in this case, will never rip the title from M$ or anyone else. It is just that for a developer or anyone else to EXPECT others to provide the basics of documentation and support is absurd.
Do you really think a significant percentage of users have ever spent as much as 60 seconds reading KDE documentation? My estimate is way below 10%. Try to keep things in perspective.
Of course they have. That's usually the first place people look if there is a problem they don't know how to deal with. Dismissing the need for adequate documentation on the specious grounds no one uses it anyway is really absurd. A lot of opensource software, though, does seem to suffer somewhat in the documentation side, not just kde. It's almost as though the developers have the attitude that they provide the programming for free so they don't need to do documentation as well. I have sympathies for both sides of this conundrum, but perhaps there is a middle way where developers and users could benefit from more interaction on documentation - where developers provide basic outlines that non-programmers could flesh out, and users help to write some of that documentation.
You should also consider that the KMail UI improvements being discussed here are brand new features in KDE 4.2 - mostly done by a Google Summer of Code student if I'm not mistaken.
Yes, perhaps we should cut some slack on really new features. But my basic point is that we all need to help, and there is a need for adequate documentation. -- Bob Smits, bob@rsmits.ca "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org