[Dovecot] DSYNC needs a lot more documentation

[Marc Perkel]

On 8/22/2010 7:29 AM, Jerry wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:51:12 -0700
> Marc Perkel<marc at perkel.com>  articulated:
>
>> When you write software you never have to learn it so you don't have
>> the perspective of someone who never heard of it before and wondering
>> "what is this?"
> That has always been the problem when the instruction books is written
> by the products designer/creator, software or otherwise. This is why
> many commercial distributors hire outside consultants to write their
> instruction manuals.
>
> I was briefly involved in that field as a part time adventure.
> Unfortunately, the powers that be all to often considered that
> including all possible scenarios would make the manual overly confusing
> to the novice user. Plus, as both IBM and Microsoft learned the hard
> way, nobody RTFM anyway.
>

I have always been of the opinion that colleges who teach technical 
writing should hook up with open source developers and have their 
students write the docs for the project and work with developers on 
feature requests and do tech support. It would be win/win because they 
would get a good education and open source software dovs would greatly 
improve.

I had the same problem when I was a commercial software developer. I 
never had to learn it so I knew too much to do the docs right. However 
since I was doing my own support I quickly realized that if there were 
questions the users had that weren't covered in the docs, I added them 
to the docs. Saved me a lot of support effort.