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

[Morten Kjeldgaard <mok@imsb.au.dk>]

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.

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.

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

-- 
Morten Kjeldgaard   <mok@imsb.au.dk>             | Phone : +45 89 42 50 26
Institute of Molecular and Structural Biology    | Fax   : +45 86 12 31 78
Aarhus University                                | Home  : +45 86 18 81 80
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