[mythtv-users] DRAFT of proposed new FAQ (or HowTo section)

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Wed Jun 25 19:30:14 EDT 2003


At 08:15 PM 6/25/2003 -0400, Robert Kulagowski wrote:
>[...]
>I believe that this is an Isaac question and how he feels about
>multiple documentation efforts.  The existing HOWTO grew out of the
>same desire that you have now; to make it easier to install MythTV,
>with my efforts starting in the 0.7 era.  Because of that, it has
>grown to try to encompass different distributions, since really,
>there aren't _that_ many ways of compiling MythTV from scratch.  I've
>tried to be aware of the issues that people raise in the mailing
>lists and incorporate those issues and changes into the document.

Working on this draft got me thinking about the HowTo a bit more from an 
organizational standpoint. You end up doing a lot of pointing to specific 
locations in the HowTo where information people are asking for is located. 
The problem you are, implicitly, addressing in these cases is often that 
the information is in a unlikely place in the HowTo ... usually in one of 
the catchall sections at the end rather than an earlier section where one 
might naturally look for it.

It strikes me that the location oddities are a problem because the HowTo 
itself is not easy to search. If it were available as a 1-page (1 Web page, 
I mean) document ... either instead of or in addition to its present 
chapter format ... it would be easy to search for a string in it, and 
improbable locations would be less of a problem. When I use a HowTo from 
TLDC, for example, I almost always load the 1-page version for exactly this 
reason.

Relative to a lot of ideas being discussed, this is a fairly simple change 
to make. Give it some thought.





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