Re: Reasons for wanting to remove my documents

[Morten Kjeldgaard <mok@imsb.au.dk>]

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Vladimir Vuksan wrote:

> with an extremely long delay. One of the updates during the summer took
> about two months. On numerous occasions I sent e-mail to the Tim (the
> howto maintainer) asking him what was the status of the update or
> whether there were any problems with the document. I never received a
> single response. Most of my documentation changes fairly often,
> especially Cable Modem mini-HOWTO so having updates every two months is
> simply not acceptable. 

I've had pretty much the same expericence with our mini-HOWTO (RedHat-CD).
The first version of the HOWTO was submitted 980926. On 981025, I
submitted it again, since nothing had happened. I don't remember when it
appeared at the LDP, but by then I had figured out that updates were very
s l o w, so I put a URL in the HOWTO so people could fetch the latest
version of the document. Perhaps you could do the same.

I've tried to update the LDP version of the document many times, but the
version still reads Dec. 27. 1998. I sent letters to Tim on 981227,
990111, 990426: no replies. I wrote to the former LDP leader Gregh
Hanskins on 990126 and 990512, and got friendly and quick response, but he
was apparently unable to do anything.

I was very pleased to see the reorganization of the LDP (the website looks
great), and it now seems that things are moving in the right direction.
However, I was surprised to see that Tim Bynum is still responsible for
the HOWTOs... It's fair enough to be busy, but then a person should step
back. The authors of HOWTOs are _also_ busy, and getting updates in
quickly saves everybody time.

I have recently sent the newest version (1.29) again to the ldp-submit
list. I am really looking forward to see what will happen now.

> discovered that there were a lot of people having the very same problem,
> unresponsivness of the LDP team. This has made me really bitter.

I think you should give the new LDP team a chance to get organized, and
see how things are going before you go to such drastic steps as pulling
your document out of the LDP. By doing so, you are really only hurting the
Linux community. Please don't!

> delay and two of my updates disappeared. I have also learned that
> metalab has offered to host a CVS server for LDP and had the server set
> up but LDP leadership declined the offer, why I have no idea but that

If this is correct, that is certainly a _very_ poor decision that needs to
be reconsidered. Using CVS, authors could save time answering emails from
people, and spend it fixing bugs and updating the documentation.

/Morten

---
Morten Kjeldgaard   <mok@imsb.au.dk>             | Phone : +45 89 42 50 26
Institute of Molecular and Structural Biology    | Fax   : +45 86 12 31 78
Aarhus University                                | Home  : +45 86 18 81 80
Gustav Wieds Vej 10 C, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark | icq   : 27224900


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