@harmoniousanger @kevinrns

This right here, but...

It's important to understand Debian's culture. A solid description is it's the bazaar from Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and The Bazaar." There is a strong emphasis on #decentralization over #cohesion and a strong #resistance to a top-down structure and #authority. Culturally, the devs and maintainers consider #code primary and #documentation a nice to have but not essential. Furthermore, there are no enforced documentation standards. With such decentralization and full autonomy from devs and maintainers, the end result is thousands of people doing whatever they want and documenting however they see fit. #Debian #developers also assume a high degree of #technical #competency from whoever uses it.

Concerning the Debian Wiki, there is no editor-in-chief nor any ownership and a reflection of its culture. The attitude is "if you want something better, be the one to do it." The #quality of articles varies wildly, from chicken scratch notes to a walk through.

With so much #resistance to authority and change, improving documentation is a real #challenge. That being said, the simplest solutions at the moment are:

1.) Adopt the Debian Administrator's Handbook and collaboratively maintain it.

2.) Improve the wiki by adding templates and freshness tags.

The organization, culture, and project are honestly so fascinating. Honestly, it blows me away that one of THE most #influential operating systems ever functions in such a beautifully chaotic way. I mean, it has hundreds of derivatives and forks under it including #Ubuntu and #Mint (which are incredibly successful on their own). It's paradoxical that something that large and influential has barely any coverage. People don't write books on Debian but there are plenty for #RHEL and Ubuntu. Heck, there are more books on #FreeBSD at this very moment than Debian....which also further gatekeeps the knowledge from people.

But....it's important to understand why and what Debian actually is. I use my operating systems to cars analogy. RHEL, Ubuntu, #SUSE are all like going to different dealerships and buying a #car. All commercial off the shelf products. Debian is like skipping the dealership and buying the car kit from which you build your own. It's so much more than the "DIY hacker distro" but a powerful #development base for #tech #projects. Not unlike building a Go-Kart, a monstrous 6x6 truck, or a sports car. It's #flexible, #powerful, and can be tailored to one's needs. But, like a car kit, there's no glossy manual, just #technical specs.

It assumes you know what you are doing or that you are willing to get your hands dirty to learn.

When viewed from this perspective, it makes sense why documentation is the way it is. I'm not saying it's right but for its documentation to be improved to being on par with other OSes it would require a massive organizational shift to being a centralized #cathedral.

#paradox #Linux #opensource #collaboration