[erlang-questions] FOP (was: Re: Trace-Driven Development)

[Michael Turner]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 06/07/2012 10:51 AM, Michael Turner wrote:
>>
>> What you suggest would need to be something that generates the header
>> (and footers?) of every page, so it's actually programming of a kind,
>> and for a documentation generator I don't know anything about. It
>> wouldn't surprise me if figuring it out would require two days of
>> concerted effort on my part, but only 20 minutes of concerted effort
>> on the part of someone at Ericsson.
>
>
> That's a lot of assumptions, you don't seem to even have looked yet. I'll
> add an assumption to that:
>
> It probably would have taken less time than to complain about it.

Well then, YOU go do it in three minutes or however long YOU think it
would take. Decades of experience in software tells me that if
something seems like it should take 20 minutes but requires first
learning how a system works, it'll almost always take days -- if you
can do it at all. Is it such a strange assumption on my part that
there's somebody in Erlang/OTP who *already* knows how their own
documentation system works? In any case, they can do this a lot more
easily than most people, and if they are sincere in their expressed
desire for documentation patches, it would get more help from more
people on the documentation. It's not the MediaWiki "edit" tab, but it
would be something, at least, besides the bland reaction to complaints
about the documentation that "we are happy to receive documentation
patches."

-michael turner