Re: HOWTO vs mini-HOWTO [was: Linux Doc Infrastructure]

["der.hans" <ldp-discuss@LuftHans.com>]

I've dropped gnome-doc off, since my reply is only about my proposed
removable drive HOWTO.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, der.hans wrote:
> 
> > Many of the minis need to be incorporated into the regular howtos or
> > merged together with like topics anyway. For instance, I plan on making a
> > "removable drive HOWTO" as soon as I get my scsi card working with my
> 
> It is Great that you want to update these documents but I think it would
> be _much_ better to keep them separate, and use the document tree
> structure to group them. Thus, you'd have a "Removable Drive" category
> containing the documents on JAZ, ZIP, floppy, etc.
> 
> The reasons for keeping several smaller documents are:
> 
> 1) A monolithic document is harder to maintain, even if there are several
> people maintaining it.

A very small monolith indeed :).

> 2) You don't normally need it. For example, if I need information on a ZIP
> drive, I don't want to waste paper printing out information on JAZ and
> floppy drives.

I'm not planning on including normal floppies and haven't decided if the
120 mb things should be. I think so, but need to find out more about how
they work. In any case, it doesn't matter which specific drive you have
any more than it matters which specific scsi hard drive you have. There
are a few specific issues, but really only a few. The key points of the
howto are working with a drive that is sometimes there and sometimes
not. I got info on how to get my orb working from a Jaz HOWTO and a Zip
HOWTO. Both only had part of the relevant info that was needed in each of
the docs.

Maybe there could continue to be specific things for the individual
drives, but really that seems to be like putting in an ST1200N HOWTO :).

> 3) Smaller, focused documents are easier to cross-reference, and it is
> easier to define alternate information paths to them. For example, you may
> want to group the ZIP drive under "USB devices" as well as "Removable

As USB itself is "removable", I wasn't really planning on covering it as a
connectivity mechanism. The tenets of dealing with changing drives in and
out, though, stay the same.

ciao,

der.hans

> Drives", but it would not be relevant to put JAZ drives in this category.
>  
> /Morten

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