Re: Just shoot me now (was Re: What's wrong with this fancy split?)

[asjo@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren)]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:12:52 -0600, Tommy wrote:

> So my questions at the moment are definitely not veiled demands for
> someone to fix things for me. Rather they are mostly requests for
> information to allow *me* to do the fixing.

Great!

> Of course some pre-requisite knowledge really is pre-requisite. You
> can't do physics without calculus. But sometimes the lower levels are
> poking through needlessly. You *don't* need to understand Goedel's
> Incompleteness Theorem to do physics, even though it is profoundly
> important.

"Just" Emacs is kind of a beast to get into, even just terminology-wise.
It is not an easy balance: How much can you as a manual-writer of Gnus
assume that the reader is familiar with Emacs? With Emacs lisp?

I used to be exceedingly annoyed about examples in Emacs manuals,
because I could never figure the quoting out. I seem to have learned
something by osmosis, because I am not as annoyed any more.

> Regardless, in many cases I think a bit of extra wordiness in the
> docs will allow the new user to get moving faster, thereby helping their
> learning when the time comes for them to dive into the guts and,
> conversely, lowering the question burden on the experts. Reuse an' all
> that :-)

Agreed - I think your patches will be welcomed with open arms :-)


  Best regards,

    Adam

-- 
 "Accept the mystery!"                                        Adam Sjøgren
                                                         asjo@koldfront.dk