Re: Writing introductory documentation; looking for feedback

[James Morrison]

--- THOMAS EDWARD HART <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello, all!
> 
> I'm writing some introductory documentation for the Hurd.
> It's aimed at three groups:
> 
> 1. People who are complete end-users; I try to tell them the
> basic idea of what the Hurd is, and then advise them to use 
> 
> something more stable (like Debian GNU/Linux) for now.

 Matthew Grant <address@hidden> is working on this and has stuff commited
under the documentation module of hurdextras, 
http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/hurdextras.

> 2. People who know how to program, but have little to no
> practical knowledge of how to use any Free UNIX-like system (I 
> 
> advise introductory computer science labs, and I see many
> such people.)

 I realize these people exist, but seriously how do you program for a platform
that you don't, and/or don't know how to use?

> 3. People are great hackers, and can use GNU/Linux like
> nobody's business, but don't have a strong background in
> operating 
> 
> systems, and likely believe that microkernels are not a good
> thing (I know people like this too).

 This is what the hurd reference manual is for, see info hurd.

> 
> I want people in the latter two groups to be able to go over
> my documentation, and then have the background to (mostly) 
> 
> understand the current introductory material (such as
> _Towards a New Strategy of OS Design_ and _The Hurd Hacking
> Guide_). I 
> 
> hope that, when completed, this documentation can be added
> to the official GNU documentation at hurd.gnu.org.

 If you help Matthew separate and extend the Hurd reference manual into the
Hurd users and Hurd developers/reference manual, I hope those can become the
official documentation, i.e., info hurd.

 
> -- Tom Hart
> address@hidden

 I hope these comments help in some way.


=====
James Morrison
   University of Waterloo
   Computer Science - Digital Hardware
   2A co-op
http://hurd.dyndns.org

Anyone referring to this as 'Open Source' shall be eaten by a GNU

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