Older blog entries for kevindumpscore (starting at number 2)

Cactus posted a note on the gnome-doc mailing list asking for documentation help on his project. But instead of using DocBook (the Gnome standard) for his documentation, he is using some home-brewed standard he concocted by himself. Check out this XML document in the "guikachudoc" format (http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/guikachu/doc/resources .xml)

Why are programmers/project leaders so afraid of DocBook?

What if every single Gnome program has its own ad-hoc documentation standard? That would be a maintenance nightmare. We need a standard for Open Source documentation! DocBook is what most of the major projects use.

His project, Guikachu , does seem cool though. It's a graphical editor that helps one design screens for Palm PDA programs. If you've ever typed PILRC resource files by hand, you'd realize that this program is a major time-saver.

Another project shot me down this past week. John Lazzaro of the sfront project wasn't interested in using DocBook. He wanted to keep his reference manual's horrendous HTML layout.

This layout is horrible (http:// www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/sfman/), it uses multiple tables with two separate running columns. The tables break in strange places. Sometimes the columns are only tenuously related to each other. It doesn't make any sense. Attempting to read it gives me a headache.

At least he keeps it up-to-date, uses FDL, and provides a way to look at it off-line. IMHO, that puts him light-years ahead of most Open Source projects as far as documentation goes.

Just got an advogato account today.

I find this interface very frustrating. Now all of a sudden, I can enter diary entries. Do I have to wait a certain amount of time before I am permitted to do things? It doesn't make sense.

In order to login I have to hit the People link. Then I see an Account link at the bottom of that page. Why can't I just login from the main page like Slashdot? I had to wade through a couple of links to get to this diary entry page too.

Who do I contact when I have problems? I don't see any contact information on the site. How do I join a project listed on advogato? Do I have to send an email to the person who maintains it? How do you send an email to someone else with an advogato account.

Where's a FAQ? Arrrrrrrgh!