Re: New superior without new RDN

[Dave Horsfall <daveh@ci.com.au>]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Howard Chu wrote:

> > I'm starting to see too many mistakes in 
> > "http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/"; to trust it now.  Or, for that 
> > matter, Howes/Smith/Good (1st Ed).
> 
> Only starting? Tim Howes' book was authoritative, a lifetime ago. Living
> technologies evolve.

Some here regard Howes' book as a bible; indeed, it gets recommended from 
time to time.  Is the 2nd edition any better?

> The Zytrax stuff looked like a nice effort at first, but as usual, I 
> question the motives. People who genuinely want to help others spend 
> time doing exactly that, in public forums. People who genuinely want to 
> improve the state of the OpenLDAP documentation do exactly that, by 
> contributing docs and patches to the Project. People who sit off in 
> their corner of the world proclaiming their authoritative knowledge 
> about a piece of technology that they otherwise have made no visible 
> contribution to strike me as just being leeches. Even worse when their 
> docs are full of errors.

Which in turn illustrates the dichotomy of the problem: those in the best 
position to document something i.e. the developers themselves are the very 
ones who cannot (because they're too busy) or should not (because they are 
too close to it, and take things for granted).  This got drilled into me 
around 25 years ago, at a DEC device driver course.

On the other hand, Open Source has no official Documentation Department.

On the gripping hand, end-users will document that which they do not 
understand...

> On a slightly related topic - the first several chapters of my OpenLDAP 
> Administration book will be published on the web in a few months. Even 
> after it comes out on paper, we'll be revising the electronic copy over 
> time. It's somewhat unavoidable that documenting OpenLDAP is a moving 
> target - only dead things stop moving.

I'll certainly purchase it.

-- 
Dave Horsfall  DTM  VK2KFU  daveh@ci.com.au  Ph: +61 2 9552-5509 (d) -5500 (sw)
Corinthian Eng'ng P/L, Ste 54 Jones Bay Whf, 26-32 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont 2009, AU