Chainsawing the "Mouse" section of the FAQ

[Doug Barton]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Michael W . Lucas wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 03:16:07PM +0100, Nik Clayton wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 12:09:43PM -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> > > "Michael W . Lucas" <mwlucas at blackhelicopters.org> writes:
> > > > Any comments?
> > >
> > > Sure.  Your considerable talents would be better spent on the FreeBSD
> > > Handbook.  The FAQ should be a delete-only document.  The sooner it rots
> > > away, the better.  It's upkeep involves a duplication of effort that is
> > > worse than useless, as it tends to force FreeBSD users to have to hunt
> > > for information in an extra place for information that is not
> > > necessarily any more helpful than what the Handbook (or an Article) has
> > > (or should have).  It's bad enough that the FDP has to duplicate so much
> > > of what xfree86.org has on mouse configuration, but that's given the
> > > existance and nature of "moused", I guess there's no alternative to
> > > that.
> >
> > Hmm.
> >
> > I quite like the idea of the FAQ merging in to the Handbook.
> >
> > Each chapter starts with a "Synopsis" section -- there's no reason why
> > they couldn't end with a "FAQ" section.  If we wanted a separate FAQ
> > document, it could be generated by pulling out all the FAQ sections from
> > the Handbook.
>
> Didn't we hash this out a couple of years ago?  :-)

Yes, but a lot has changed since then.

> Personally, I think that the FAQ and the Handbook serve two different
> purposes.  The Handbook is tutorial-oriented, the FAQ is for quick
> answers to basic questions.  We need both.

Personally, I'm not saying "get rid of the FAQ." My suggestion is to
incorporate the answers to the FAQ's into the handbook, and make the FAQ
itself a serious of links to the relevant handbook sections.

One of the things that's changed in the intervening years is the actual
hard copy publication of the handbook, making the integration of all the
relevant data that much more useful.

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