Re: Emacs Windows FAQ

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 10/7/2010 5:02 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>>> Just the other day, I answered somebody's query in emacs.help newsgroup
>>> by referring to the FAQ.  It didn't give him the right answer, but it
>>> pointed him in the right direction.
>>
>> What was the issue, and why wouldn't it be more useful if it were
>> described in the Emacs FAQ instead?
>
> The question was where to find the .emacs file on Windows.  I went to the
> Windows Emacs FAQ, as I have always done for such issues, but the answer
> there was probably out of date.  So, it wasn't right but it gave ideas to
> the user as to where else he might look.
>
> I have now checked the Emacs FAQ, which doesn't have an answer to the
> question, but the Appendix G of the Emacs manual does.  So, the FAQs could
> perhaps give a pointer to the Appendix G, without giving a direct answer
> themselves.
>
> Your original proposal was to "simply remove" the Windows Emacs FAQ from the
> web site.  If you want to amend that to say, transfer all the information to
> Emacs FAQ and *then* remove it from the web site, I would obviously have no
> objection.  But, who is going to do it?
>
> Another factor that concerns me is that the Windows Emacs FAQ is not just an
> Emacs FAQ.  It also answers questions about how to integrate Emacs with
> other components of the "GNU operating system" on Windows or even the
> "Windows operating system".  For instance, questions like how do I unpack
> the distribution, how do I get it to work with Internet Explorer, and so on.
>  Do you want to put all such information on the general Emacs FAQ?
>
> A third factor is that the Windows Emacs FAQ was produced by a community of
> users who knew exactly what the issues were.  It is very hard, if not
> impossible, for developer teams produce such FAQs because they think in an
> entirely different plane.
>
> I have been in a lot of situations where sys-admins got rid of documentation
> produced by user teams because they were supposedly "obsolete", but they
> ended up replacing them with other documentation which was way inferior.
>  (They of course thought they were superior. :-)

How about moving this to EmacsWiki? The reason for having it in an
official Emacs place is that it should be more correct there, but if
this in fact does not work now then perhaps moving it to EmacsWiki
might be a better option.

If that happens I would however still suggest that someone is
officially responsible for that particular page on EmacsWiki and
corresponds with contributors to really keep it correct.