[haiku-doc] Some thoughts about the UserGuide

  • From: Philippe Michael Groarke <philippe_groarke@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-doc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 21:21:45 -0800 (PST)

Hello everybody! This is my first post on this mailing-list, and I'd like to 
thank you all for this great document called UserGuide :) I recently talked 
(very shortly) with Humdinger about this guide. I've been building and testing 
Haiku for a little while now, but haven't really got into it (Haiku) because 
I'm new to the BeOS way of things, until I found out about the GUIDE. Now that 
I've found the userguide is included with builds, I decided I'd post some 
comments/thoughts about it. I haven't finished the Guide yet (I'm up to the 
Workshop, which seems really nice) but some obvious things came up to me. By 
the way, WOW, Haiku/BeOS is certainly an OS worth checking out, I'm very 
impressed at what I learned (and now can do) reading this Guide (coming from a 
Windows, Linux, Mac OS X background).

So, here are my little thoughts:

1.    Haiku UserGuide should be available on documentation page, right now :) . 
I personally think it should gradually replace the need for the sections of 
End-User. All the available sections (Audio & Video, Hardware, Installation 
etc...) should gradually be replaced by chapters from the UserGuide, so what's 
the need anyway? If a document fits into a category, then why shouldn't it be 
in the UserGuide. Which brings me to my second thought...

2.    The UserGuide should include revised versions of the current installation 
documents (and any document relative to a End User). The 3 present on the doc 
page, and some from the development documents (Building from OS X (revised), 
Building from Ubuntu, Installing Haiku to a partition from linux, and any 
others that could help installation while in the pre-alpha throughout to R1). 
Obviously, when Haiku hits R1, the UserGuide should contain basic info on the 
current installation methods. But building from linux and OS X could be put in 
the file, as a bonus. Any info not directly related to developers 
(programming/C++ intense) should be included in the UserGuide. Some articles on 
blogs could be in there too (revised).

If you want to include those documents into the UserGuide, or some of them, I'd 
be willing to help with formating and corrections.

I have posted a thread about this on the forum, and other than the everlasting 
(it seems in the Haiku community) fight about forum vs. mailing list, some 
people pointed me to the web mailing-list, and the enhancement tickets. I 
thought I'd post here first, as I'm quite sure my points were discussed before.

Cheers and congrats,
Socapex_2K



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