Wine FAQ removed from the doc tarballs

Francois Gouget fgouget at free.fr
Fri Mar 18 19:10:45 CST 2005


On Fri, 18 Mar 2005, Hiji wrote:
[...]
> As a web developer (and Wine user), I feel inclined to
> believe that all major documentation should be removed
> from the source.  A README file pointing the user to
> the web site for the latest documentation would be
> most efficient and beneficial.

I always find it annoying when I cannot go to /usr/share/doc/<package> 
name to find documentation for some piece of software. Granted that's 
for Debian packages but the principle is the same if you download the 
wine binaries and the corresponding wine documentation tarball.

Also, once compressed the Wine FAQ is less than 23KB which is not much 
even for a modem (less than 10 seconds). And modem users are also those 
who are the most likely to pay their Internet access by the minute.


> Basically, by doing this, users will begin realizing
> that if they want documentation, WineHQ is the place
> to go.

Again this will greatly penalise modem users with per-minute Internet 
access fees (i.e. phone bills).


> In a sense, it is streamlining information.
> Not only does this reduce user confusion, but it also
> minimizes the propagation of old documentation which
> no one will have the power to update.
[...]

IMHO removing the documentation from the main Wine sources means it is 
much less likely to get updated because developers will have to get 
out of their way to even get its sources.

Also you may limit the spread of old documentation but you will instead 
end up in the situation where only documentation available will be the 
one for the latest Wine and users who have a slightly older Wine will 
have no documentation at all.

Sure right now you'd better use a pretty recent Wine anyway but this 
will have to change one day (e.g. when we reach 1.0).


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
  The greatest programming project of all took six days; on the seventh day the
   programmer rested. We've been trying to debug the *&^%$#@ thing ever since.
                       Moral: design before you implement.



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