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Postings from November 2003
>>>>> "Shlomi" == Shlomi Fish <shlomif@vipe.technion.ac.il> writes: Shlomi> A good idea to revitalize them and adapt them to our needs, would be to Shlomi> start a Phalanx like project for documentation. I think the problem you'll find in finding recruits is that the people who need to either write or sign off on such documentation are already doing everything they can on a volunteer basis, and that the current docs are perceived to hit that "80/20" mark already. You know, the first 80% of the work takes 80% of the time to do, and the last 20% takes the other 80% of the time to do. :) Yes, the docs are written by Unix-centric programmers for others like themselves, and yes, that's 80% of Perl's audience. When that wasn't satisfactory for a large enough chunk of the audience, the marketplace stepped in and provided (like my "Learning Perl" and our courses, and free support areas like perlmonks and beginners@perl.org). But you've haven't completely explained (at least to me) why there's both a large enough market that should get additional info for free that isn't being satisified by the existing mechanisms, and enough motivation to divert resources away from other projects where either the key developers or relatively smart intermediaries are already highly in demand. (Good tech writers are hard to find.) If there's a large enough market that a commercial solution can exist, please talk to any of many highly motivated local techwriters. I'm sure they would love to get published, and could take the market size to the local publishers for a proposal. Man pages are meant to be a bit rough around the edges anyway. We're all familiar and comfortable with that. Thank goodness the source is available for everything with an opaque manpage. :) -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!