[TriLUG] TLDP

[cristobalpalmer at gmail.com]

> On Jan 4, 2015, at 5:07 AM, Peter Neilson <neilson at windstream.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 04 Jan 2015 04:28:37 -0500, Jason Evans <jsevans at youvegotthe.info> wrote:
> 
>> Does anyone know if The Linux Documentation Project (tldp.org) is still an active project?  Most of the documentation there is years old and out of date.  I'd like to join an open source project. add get some more experience writing documentation. Anyone here work with or for them in the past? If they are not really active, do you have any suggestions on where I can go to volunteer?
> 
> Who uses it, and for what purpose?

$ for i in 1 2 3; do sudo zcat 2015/01/www.tldp.org.vhost$i.access.log.20150103.gz | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u >> /tmp/tldp ; done ; sort -u /tmp/tldp | wc -l
34300

About 34k distinct IPv4 addresses accessed it yesterday. Presumably for documentation.


> 
> Is the project write-only storage by default? In other words if nobody uses it, then there is no point in fixing it.
> 

See the mailing lists linked in the left sidebar of the main page. For convenience: http://tldp.org/mailinfo.html#maillists

> I'd not even heard of it before, and as of now have spent less than a minute examining the website.
> 

Maybe take a bit more time next time. There are many (several hundred) people on this list, and they deserve your best efforts.

> There is a theory that for development purposes "RTFM" is a bad idea, because TFM is always out of date, and RTFSC is the only rational approach. 

This is needlessly exclusionary and shames those who find reading source code daunting, or at least more painful than is appropriate for whatever task they set out to do before they ended up reading. To put it more bluntly: the vast majority of people, and possibly a majority on this mailing list, would not be willing or able to follow this approach. Quality documentation is useful and people should be praised for wanting to contribute by producing more of it. This is so non-controversial and obviously true that it’s a bit weird to be writing it.

Cheers,
--
Cristóbal Palmer
Technical Director, ibiblio.org
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB #3456, Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456