A confused Network Admin

[Lisi, Christine]

Marco - I couldn't have put it better myself.  The best OpenSource
documentation of the four I have dealt with in the last 2 weeks came
with PHP; twenty-three pages of step-by-step instructions, and they
didn't forget about Windows users.  I agree that this listserver
wouldn't be nearly as busy if the documentation on the OpenSource
products was more complete and precise, and I also wish there was more
of a collaborative effort between the programmers when releasing new
versions.

All I can say is, thank goodness for this listserver because I could
have never gotten through this with documentation alone.

Christine Lisi
Application Specialist

Management Information Systems * City of Delray Beach * 100 NW First
Avenue, Delray Beach, FL 33444

Phone, 561-243-7142 * Fax, 561-243-7166 * eMail, Lisi at MyDelrayBeach.com


-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Marco Marsella
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 1:07 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] A confused Network Admin

I would like to reassure Christine that she's not the only one confused
about OpenSource in general and MapServer in particular. I have over 25
years of professional programming experience in too many languages,
starting with FORTRAN IV when some of the listers here where probably
not even able to read yet ;-)

I find myself also *very* confused because of the terribly poor
documentation that usually complements OpenSource projects. Most often
than not, there is just a very technical document that tersely explains
what you can do with this or that parameter. With most Java projects
you just find the JavaDoc! There is little or no high-level
documentation that explains the architecture and lets you find your way
around. Most of the projects require that you spend an inordinate
amount of time looking at the code to understand what you can do and
how.

For me, I find the MapServer documentation absolutely insufficient and
it is amazing how people prefer to spend a lot of time replying on this
list rather than investing much more efficiently their time writing
decent documentation and providing good tutorials and examples.

Please, do not misunderstand me! I think MapServer is a terrific
project and I am incredibly grateful to the very knowledgeable guys out
there willing to help through the list. Only, I would much prefer
having good documentation to work through and bother the listers only
when absolutely necessary.

As you may have seen, I put my.. time where the mouth is. As soon as I
learn how to do something, I will post a message to the list hoping
that it might be of help to others (see "[UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] A
simple... sample!" dated 10 Feb 2005). Sure, it is a trivial example,
but it took me *a lot* of time (and a zillion Google searches) to
figure out, much longer than I would expect! I will be more than happy
to continue doing so to alleviate the trouble of learning MapServer!

Cheers

Marco