Re: thoughts on documentation reuse.

[Wes Hardaker <wes@hardakers.net>]

>>>>> On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 18:20:49 -0800, Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com> said:

Andy> I also think it's important to keep the tool requirements to a
Andy> minimum level. If there was a freely available, properly
Andy> maintained tool for this purpose, then I wouldn't have any
Andy> objections.

I was coming at it from the impression that someone from the working
group would produce a reference tool.

Andy> Another approach is to do a much better job organizing and
Andy> managing type definitions. If we kept H files as scattered
Andy> and unorganized as we do for TEXTUAL-CONVENTIONs, we would 
Andy> get fired from our jobs as programmers.

heh

Andy> I would rather have properly organized TYPEDEFs than a tool that
Andy> did the cut-and-paste automatically.

The problem frequently brought up in the meeting was that people
(readers) simply didn't want to follow references.  They wanted as
much descriptive information as possible in one place.
MIB-knowledgeable people probably would read the shortened
pre-compiled version instead since they don't want to page down
through all the repeated lines of text.  It optimizes for both cats
and dogs, which is what I was trying to get at.

Andy> Maybe a combination of both approaches can give everybody what
Andy> they want.

Probably.

-- 
Wes Hardaker
NAI Labs
Network Associates