Re: Building 22.1, on Ubuntu

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 16:55:12 +0200, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:
>>On 2007-09-09 10:47, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'll collect my findings on my site when I've finished.
>>
>> Nice.  IMHO, that's exactly the free software spirit that we should
>> foster in communities like the Emacs' users community.
>
> I don't agree: as a package maintainer, it is _one_ major source of
> irritation if people who can't be bothered to read the installation
> instructions then put up a web site with their personal take on how
> things should work.  10 years later, still people use those
> instructions to paint themselves into a corner and complain on mailing
> lists and newsgroups how broken things are.
>
> If a user figures out something that is missing in the documentation,
> he should contribute to the _upstream_ documentation instead of
> creating _another_ incomplete inaccurate experience report that will
> work, if you are lucky, on one particular platform with one particular
> version if at all, possibly breaking a number of things in the process
> that the report creator was not aware of.
>
> _If_ there is something wrong with the upstream documentation, helping
> to fix it is _much_ more important and helpful than putting up another
> thing in competition.  Scattering partial information of inscrutable
> quality all around the web helps nobody.

Right.  I don't disagree with this at all.  Which is just below the text to 
which you replied I wrote:

% Please note that the Emacs source tree contains already a lot of
% useful documentation of this sort.  The file `etc/MACHINES' lists
% various configure script options, environment setup and other useful
% bits that building Emacs may require.
%
% I don't see Ubuntu GNU/Linux mentioned in the current CVS tree of
% Emacs, so if you are willing to collect some of the experience you
% have gained so far in a short, concise summary -- something like a
% paragraph or two -- it may be a very useful addition to the mini
% guides of that file :-)

I happen to severely dislike random web sites with out of date "howto"
information, googled semi-randomly by 15-year old teenagers, who then
like complaining that "Linux is hard".

I understand the drive behind trying to "document" things this way, but
what you described (and what I had suggested in the snipped text
re-quoted above is a much better way of improving Emacs).

So we are in perfect agreement here :-)

- Giorgos