[texhax] For what it's worth

[William F. Adams]

On Monday, October 18, 2004, at 10:21  AM, Tom Schneider wrote:

> This does not solve the problem the person was facing.  He wants to
> KNOW what it is without having to run all over the net.  It takes a
> bit more work on the part of the person to document it, but allows
> someone to know what it does in an instant.

This was hashed and rehashed on the OS X TeX mailing list a while back.

> You can never have enough documentation.

The problem seems to be in many cases there's so much that people tend 
to ignore it.

The task in question was:

Installing LyX.

There's a web page which tells one what one needs to get to do this, 
and the i-Installer.app description covers this quite well. In the 
course of that, a naive user will see the names of a couple of packages 
which are _not_ germane to the task at hand. The reasonable thing for 
them to do is ignore it, unless their curiousity is piqued in which 
case, there's enough information at hand to allow a person to research 
it.

The alternative is to have Gerben use his valuable time cluttering up 
the readme w/ information which a person who needs a given package will 
already have, and which anyone who is curious about can readily look up.

Robin F. then observed:

> you can never write enough documentation.  i'm admittedly slow, but my
> output of net-wide published documentation is about 20 lines a week.
> why are we all being pilloried for failing to write documentation
> about a package hardly any of us use (lyx on macos, aiui -- heck, i've
> never even had a mac)?

And there's already a sufficiency of information for a user to manage 
this.

The wiki (http://wiki.lyx.org/pmwiki.php/LyX/Mac) notes:

> Prerequisites
>
> For Gerben Wierda’s teTeX implementation, use his convenient 
> i-Installer (halfway down the page under TeX Installation and 
> Configuration Products) to install the TeX , ghostscript, Freetype2, 
> WMF and iconv conversion support, ImageMagick , and (optional) CM 
> Super packages.

Fondu isn't mentioned, and I stand by my contention that _anyone_ who 
needs it can easily figure that out.

William

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