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Re: Emacs Windows FAQ
From: |
Uday S Reddy |
Subject: |
Re: Emacs Windows FAQ |
Date: |
Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:33:00 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100915 Thunderbird/3.1.4 |
On 10/7/2010 5:02 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Just the other day, I answered somebody's query in emacs.help newsgroup by
referring to the FAQ. It didn't give him the right answer, but it pointed him
in the right direction.
What was the issue, and why wouldn't it be more useful if it were
described in the Emacs FAQ instead?
The question was where to find the .emacs file on Windows. I went to the
Windows Emacs FAQ, as I have always done for such issues, but the answer there
was probably out of date. So, it wasn't right but it gave ideas to the user as
to where else he might look.
I have now checked the Emacs FAQ, which doesn't have an answer to the question,
but the Appendix G of the Emacs manual does. So, the FAQs could perhaps give a
pointer to the Appendix G, without giving a direct answer themselves.
Your original proposal was to "simply remove" the Windows Emacs FAQ from the
web site. If you want to amend that to say, transfer all the information to Emacs FAQ
and *then* remove it from the web site, I would obviously have no objection. But, who is
going to do it?
Another factor that concerns me is that the Windows Emacs FAQ is not just an Emacs FAQ. It also
answers questions about how to integrate Emacs with other components of the "GNU operating
system" on Windows or even the "Windows operating system". For instance, questions
like how do I unpack the distribution, how do I get it to work with Internet Explorer, and so on.
Do you want to put all such information on the general Emacs FAQ?
A third factor is that the Windows Emacs FAQ was produced by a community of
users who knew exactly what the issues were. It is very hard, if not
impossible, for developer teams produce such FAQs because they think in an
entirely different plane.
I have been in a lot of situations where sys-admins got rid of documentation produced by
user teams because they were supposedly "obsolete", but they ended up replacing
them with other documentation which was way inferior. (They of course thought they were
superior. :-)
Cheers,
Uday