Editors, Searching, Geekness, and Gary Preckshot

[Peter Hernberg <petehern@yahoo.com>]

First: Editors
Gary seems to have some sort of super-huge issue with text editors, especially
vi. He believes emacs is okay, not from personal experience but from what heard
about psgml. Cut it out! If you want to start editor holy wars, I'm sure there's
an appropriate newsgroup. The point is this: as long as your sgml is decent,
your writing is decent, and you're technically accurate, I don't care what you
wrote it with. For all I care, you can type up your doc with a typewriter and
use ocr to get it into ones and zeros. Gary uses WP for Windows. Personally, I
would never in a million years consider it for sgml editing, but (here's the big
concept :) I don't care if he wants to use it. Some people live in emacs, and
that's okay too. Ya wanna write a HOWTO in dos edit? I _don't_ care. If you want
to make light-hearted jibes about other editors, that's fine too. Different
people work in different ways, and different editors accomodate their work best.
Some people work in vi. Get over it.

Second: Searching
Gary's issue with editors, in some vague sgml-works-in-mysterious-ways sort of
thing, is that he believes that searching problems are caused by users of text
editors. Gary Preckshot doesn't know a thing about sgml searching. Neither do I.
That's the point! SGML searching involves first buiding an sgml parser (from
what I understand, a very difficult task) and then doing something intelligent
with the parsed data (getting computers to do intelligent things can be
difficult ;). Gary, unless you've been doing a very good job hiding your
intricate knowledge of sgml parsers and searching, don't make a big deal about
it. I haven't and won't say much about searching because I don't know much about
it. If you want to learn something about the subject, you might crack open the
third volume of Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. If you can
even understand the first three sections, I will forever bow to your immense
knowledge of searching.

Third: Geekness
I am a self-acknowledged geek. It's something I'm proud of. For Gary Preckshot,
this seems to present a problem. I disagree. Our task is to write documentation
about a robust/complicated OS and its associated tools. To do this we must
possess a good deal of technical (and, incidentally, verbal) competence. Our
technical competence is probably in varying areas, but it's definitely there.
When I read the ipchains howto, I can tell that the author has set up a firewall
or two in his time, and that's a _good_ thing. Does this make him (or any of us)
a geek? Probably, depending on how you define "geek". The point is, we are
technically competent people. Let's be proud of it.Fourth: Gary PreckshotI'm
trying to keep my flamethrower in the closet (honest! :), so I won't really
shouldn't say much. Open source (and by extension, open documentation), is a
meritocracy. It's all about finding the best code (docs). Endless streams of
criticism don't make the kernel any faster; neither do they make make the LDP
any more informative.

Well, that was more like my whole checking account than my two cents, but there
you have it. Talk amongst yourselves...

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