Re: Rep:Re: Permission to submit HOWTO

[Gary Preckshot <garrell@inreach.com>]

Bruce Richardson wrote:

> Along the way you've made some valid points but the showing-off,
the
> sideswipes and put-downs on people who work differently, the
assumption
> that people know less than you and are wrong-headed or stupid if
they
> disagree... none of this is winning friends or arguments.

"Rugged Individualists" don't help because they
can miss the bigger picture for the trees. You can
characterize my comments as "the showing-off, the
sideswipes and put-downs" if you please, but it
completely ignores the fact that this forum
continually sees posts from people who ask
questions that need not be asked - if there were a
set of recommended tools that did DocBook and
guided them to the correct usage of the DTD. I
view computers as a tool. You and me and everybody
else are the beneficiaries of people who decided
that anything a computer can do, they shouldn't.
Sure, vim does nice syntax highlighting. But emacs
and WordPerfect do that and so much more. Vim
didn't get the way it is without someone being
dissatisfied with vi. Why manually search a tag
list when your editor can give you the valid tags
at any point? Why type tags, when your editor can
do it for you? Why be proud of doing something a
bunch of diodes can do? Thinking is what they
can't do, but you can.

Because of a whole lot of folks grimly attached to
old ways of doing things, progress depends on
iconoclasts who aren't afraid of saying the
shibboleth. I'll say it here: refusing to use more
capable tools is holding you back. You have people
with an investment in learning LinuxDoc who are
loathe to part with it. It shouldn't be a big
deal. It shouldn't be a big deal to generate
automated search tag lists. It's all a big deal
because there are people with an investment in the
past. You don't want to hear it. Too bad.

What's really sad is that Unix tools from 30 years
ago can make this whole process so much easier.
I'll try to do some bash scripts in the next few
days that demonstrate this.

Gary


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