Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:

>  > > if a user takes the
>  > > attitude that a program "should have" well-written documentation
>  > > designed for non-technical users to understand, and any program that
>  > > doesn't is somehow deficient in his eyes, then perhaps he would be
>  > > better served as a paying customer of a company he then has the right
>  > > to complain to.
>  > 
>  > I completely disagree.
>  > Any program offered to the public should be properly documented.
>  > This has nothing to do with open source.
>  > 
> 
> No program - open source or commercial - *need* to be
> documented.

It depends what you mean by "need".

I follow Donald Knuth's belief in "Literate Programming"
that documentation and program should go together,
for the sake of the program writer as well as the user.

> For open source, the market still works, and all other things being
> equal, the consumer will tend to choose the better documented
> product.

If I am in any way typical, the main consideration in choosing software
is to follow whatever is offered by the OS in question,
regardless of the quality of the documentation.
Personally, I would be very reluctant to consider any CentOS program
that did not have an RPM in a respectable CentOS repository,
for the simple reason that I might find it did not work after some update.

I think the only other programs I have installed on my CentOS server
are HP and Samsung printer drivers, and both of them
have wasted hours of my time.

> In the specific case of BackupPC, I personal would prefer that the
> author (Craig) focus his time on developing the next version since
> currently he is the only developer.

I wasn't referring to BackupPC specifically in my remarks in this thread.
The documentation is not particularly good, but it is not very bad either.

"Unable to read 4 bytes" is a completely useless error message,
but there are plenty of those about in Linux as in Windows.
I prefer it to NetworkManager's "Closing connection (reason:3)".


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland


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