Today in 'Latest Ubuntu Karmic fails': USB drives automount with UUID instead of 'disk' as their device name

The more I use computers the more hard-core I'm getting on making good documentation a priority. I think Linux and FOSS are well beyond so-called "community documentation" and overdue for some real professionalism. What good is writing great code if nobody knows how to use it? It's absurd. Telling users to rely on Google is ridiculous. I think Google is the worst thing to happen to software documentation because it makes it too easy to slough off the responsibility for writing good docs. Programmers like to complain about "I hate writing docs, and anyway I am a leet coder and lesser humans can handle documentation." Well I hate wasting hours and days trying to figure out basic functionality and troubleshooting. Documentation is part and parcel of coding. At the very least a thorough man page makes it possible for other people to build on them and write more detailed, friendlier howtos.

This past week has made me especially fed up. I had a problem with converting DVI to PDF in Kile, dvpdfm fails and exits with an 'error 1'. Well WTF is error 1? The man page does not say. The logfile says nothing. Shame on man page authors who do not describe error messages. Google does not say. Nobody says. I wasted many hours on this. My final solution? Give up and try it on a different distro. How the hell many different distros do I need to keep on standby? I had several other problems of the really lame variety that pretty much shot my whole week down in flames.

In anticipation of the inevitable dismissals:

1. I actively support FOSS in several ways: financially, writing howtos and help, reporting bugs (for my own amusment, it's not like they get fixed), mentoring noobs, and doing migrations 2. So don't tell me that devs' lack of thoroughness and professionalism is the user's fault.

Yep, had the change in how removable media is mounted been in the release announcement and well documented Steven would have known up front and could have modified his scripts before upgrading. I agree that the lack of adequate documentation, not the actual code change, is the real culprit here and is a genuine "fail" to use Steven's terminology.

Red Hat still has excellent docs and they are freely available online. You could always run Scientific Linux or CentOS, both free Red Hat clones, and use that documentation. It seems Oracle Linux (formerly Unbreakable Linux), another Red Hat clone, is also freely downloadable now. I haven't checked it out to see if it contains an objectionable license, something I wouldn't put past Oracle.

Vector Linux has sporadically good documentation. It gets outdated and for some time things go downhill and then someone realizes it needs to be redone and it's good again. I think a lot of distros go through that sort of thing. Documentation takes a back seat to coding and, as tuxchick says, it should be integral to the coding process.

Language issues also sometimes crop up. I get the idea that Pardus is well documented if you read Turkish. When I had an installation issue with my netbook I not only got an answer in the forum but someone translated the Turkish wiki page to English. If it had been there in English in the first place I wouldn't have had the problem.

Having said that, wiki and forum searches can be a painful way to find the info you need. It's scattershot and sometimes you have to go through several pages. My openSUSE install was made possible by an outdated page for version 10.3. I was able to figure out what was out of date (a mirror address) and work from there. Not good, is it? Novell can and should do better. They certainly have the resources.

Anyway, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant...