[ic] 4.7.x RPM?

[Stefan Hornburg Racke]

Mike Heins <mikeh@minivend.com> writes:


[...]

> 
> As the person who has written much of the documentation, I am a bit
> disappointed that I haven't been able to produce what people need.

Mike, I can understand this. It is hard to write the code _and_
the documentation on such a fast moving target as Interchange is.

> No one has seemed to have been able to produce pertinent examples of
> what actually *is* needed, which hamstrings me a bit. Most features
> of Interchange are documented, some of them in excruciating detail.

This is right, but one of the problems is that they are sometimes
hard to find. It happens to me too, so I think, there are some
drawbacks in the documentation.

First I think the organization of the topics is rather confusing.
Without the explanatory texts below "Interchange Installation",
"Interchange Templates" I never had a chance to figure out which
document to choose. 
Someone should sit down and construct a completely new structure
of the documenation which is more intuitive.

The next suggestion for improvement from my side is a index like
one you find in books. This is quite better for searching, but
a lot of work. 

The optimal documentation for me is something in the Info format,
with a good indexing. C-H i, m interchange, i Perl and then
I would get some matches like "Perl, modules" "Perl, embedded"
and so on. _That_ would be great.

> In a lot of cases, people ask questions which would be easily solved
> by finding appropriate documentation references.

There will ever be people too lazy or otherwise unable to digest
documentation.

After all, Interchange is a great piece of software and the
documentation is usable and contains many information.

Just never forget all the work Mike has put into that, but
anything is improvable in the software world.

Ciao    
        Racke

-- 
Racke happily hacks Interchange and maintains Debian packages like Courier.

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