I've been reading with interest the thread about a MySQL FAQ (which has
now branched out to the MySQL documentation in general). It's always good
to see ideas about improving the documentation. However, I'd like to make
a single point:
Someome has to do the work.
Thus far, there have been a number of suggestions about what to do (some
quite grandiose and far-reaching), but, with the exception of two people
who are apparently collecting questions to put into a FAQ, has anyone
volunteered to put some hours into working on the documentation? I don't
mean to discourage anyone from coming up with ideas -- far from it, keep
them coming. But (and this applies especially to schemes for extensive
reorganization complete with lots of cross-referencing and so forth) I
wonder: are you willing to do the work to make it happen? If not, why
do you think anyone else would be? Also, if you think Monty, et al. should
do it, I personally would prefer to have them working on code to make
MySQL better, not spending all their time documenting. (This is not to
minimize the importance of documentation, but someone has to write the
code, and that's what they're already doing and -- I suspect -- prefer
to keep on doing.)
Again, I'm not criticizing ideas, just pointing out that it takes more
than ideas for documentation to improve.
--
Paul DuBois, paul@stripped
Northern League Chronicles: http://www.snake.net/nl/
