From pburns at pburns.seanet.com  Wed Oct  7 09:22:21 2009
From: pburns at pburns.seanet.com (Patrick Burns)
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:22:21 +0100
Subject: [Rd] how to document stuff most users don't want to see
In-Reply-To: <20091007034001.GF47890@orange.local>
References: <mailman.17.1254736805.9993.r-devel@r-project.org>	<20091005175041.GB31394@stat.umn.edu>	<77EB52C6DD32BA4D87471DCD70C8D70001E5FD32@NA-PA-VBE03.na.tibco.com>	<4ACA428C.80102@prodsyse.com>
	<4ACAF775.8030708@pburns.seanet.com>	<8ed68eed0910061209u62013017uafd13e4db15d6c3a@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091007034001.GF47890@orange.local>
Message-ID: <4ACC41AD.7050103@pburns.seanet.com>

Under the system of development we
now have, I agreee with Seth's
assertion.  But if there were
people dedicated to documentation,
then I think something like what I
described could be workable.

Pat


Seth Falcon wrote:
> Writing good documentation is hard.  I can appreciate the desire to
> find technological solutions that improve documentation.  However, the
> benefit of a help system that allows for varying degrees of verbosity
> is very likely to be overshadowed by the additional complexity imposed
> on the help system.
> 
> Users would need to learn how to tune the help system.  Developers
> would need to learn and follow the system of variable verbosity.  This
> time would be better spent by developers simply improving the
> documentation and by users by simply reading the improved
> documentation.
> 
> My $0.02.
> 
> + seth
>



[Rd] how to document stuff most users don't want to see
Patrick Burns