Subject: Re: Some comments
From: [email-masked] (Greg Hankins)
To: Linux Documentation Project writers <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 03:37:39 -0500

Terry Dawson writes:
>Just as a sanity check, how many of the rest of the HOWTO authors get
>abusive mail relating to their documents ? I seem to have something
>approaching a 20:1 ratio of complaint vs useful feedback. Most of the
>complaint has been caused by people reading old version of the HOWTO.

Well, I've only had one really bad one.  But, fortunately, this guy takes
every opportunity to prove what kind of a downright hateful person he is.
His name is [email-masked], and he has posted slander and lies about me,
and the Serial-HOWTO.  I've asked him on at least 2 occasions to stop.
Now he limits his posts to "Use mgetty." whenever someone has problems
with uugetty.  He has also declared the ftape software to be useless.
He has declared the getty_ps programs and the Serial-HOWTO to be useless and
full of bugs.   He also posted an article which I didn't save called
"Flame: curse on HOWTOs" or something like that, in which he declared
my Serial-HOWTO to be useless again, as well as a waste of time, and also
denounced someone else's HOWTO.  This nonsense has been going on for over
6 months.  His tone has been rude from the first time he contacted me.

At first I was upset.  Then, I was really excited to see people post replys
supporting me, and telling Tim where to go.  I hear he also caused quite
a stir on one of the comp.tex.somthing groups.

I have also thought about how difficult my "area" of coverage is.  I still
see a lot of people having problems with uugetty that I don't have answers
to.  But, IMHO setting up a dialin modem can be really hard, even if you
know what you are doing.  There are a lot of little mistakes that can be
made that hose the whole process.  I can imagine that the networking "area"
is even harder to document, thus would cause more complaints because people
can't get it working.  Another thing I have observed is that people seldom
send feedback if everything works right.  The greater percentage of mail
I get about the Serial-HOWTO, is from people who have problems.  But alas,
getting just a short note saying "thanks" is so very nice.
 
>I've gone close to sending some beg-mail to a notable couple of the
>linux distributors to make sure the last thing they get a copy of is the
>HOWTO files. Better in my opinion to have the documentation more up to date
>than the code. At least for the end user anyway.

Well, this is why I would like to see the copy policy for HOWTOs require 
notification, if they are to be distributed/printed.  Who knows, maybe I
have a new version which I could finish up quickly so it could be included...
I agree with you.  I hope that everytime a distributer make a new version they
pull down the lastest docs.  But that's only hope, who knows what they really
do :-).  I still think it's almost borderline inconsiderate to print 
something someone wrote, and sell it without notifying the author.  I mean,
how long does it take to fire off a quick message?  It's not like I'm going to
say no.

MHO,
Greg

-- 
"Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer? | Greg Hankins ([email-masked])
Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt    | Georgia Tech College of Computing,
gersput!" - World's Funniest Joke           | Computing and Networking Services 
<A HREF="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/staff/h/Greg.Hankins/">Greg Hankins</A>