Database's Wanted

[johane]

Originally Posted by wize_one

Creen,

before you go spewing things you should get your info straight.

<snip>...

As much as you are correct wize_one I can see where Creen is getting his ideas from. Let's be honest, the documentation for this project is pretty horrible - which is also the case for 95% of other OSS projects. Using Search on this site can be some kind of random text generator, and is really only very useful if you know enough about the item searched for that the result will just be a memory trigger (like a man page!!!). As it stands, unless you spend a long time reading irrelevant posts, or even posts like further down this thread (shudder) it's pretty hard to see what the logic is behind a lot of things.

Now I appreciate the effort that people have put into the Wiki, especially the effort put in by FNW and the other devs, but it's still full of outdated and incomplete stuff. The Guidebook thingy is so old that it's close to an archeological document. The Wiki CSS is so cool looking that it hurts my aging eyes (personally I can only read it if I turn off styles in FF, but that is _my_ problem).

Do I want FNW to stop developing the server and fixing bugs, and to spend 6 months fixing the documentation? No way!!! Heck, it's a horrible and thankless task to be trying to find unambiguous, politically correct descriptions of everything needed to document anything, and I'd rather see those who can write good code continue to do so (let's get this clear - I can't write _good_ code. I _can_ write horrible, non-maintainable code that bites you on the ass 5 years down the line though!!!).

Now once upon a time I worked with RMS on the early incarnations of what became the GDP (Gnu Documentation Project). That experience makes me believe that docs need to be centrally controlled, but not by the lead programmer (as an aside did you know that RMS has a way of punctuating that makes English prose look like an unholy hybrid of C and LISP?). The catch is that devs typically know the system so well that they can't see the issues and problems that "bad" docs have for neophyte users.

Now that 7.0.0 is out, there's a good chance that the number of users will climb (wan't that one of the reasons titanium was supported?). My belief is that if someone takes some care to improve the quality of the docs then this should reduce the number of stupid questions on this forum, reduce the number of ill-considered postings (like this one for example!) and maybe even allow people who might be great GMs but terrible Computer techs run interesting and fun servers.

Ontopic:

It's pretty clear that Creen doesnt actually realise what a horrible and difficult task it would be to "merge" different people's databases. The sad thing is that the rest of this thread doesnt explain that, instead it's a bunch of people carrying on like LOADING...PLEASE WAIT