<quote who="Quanah Gibson-Mount">
--On Tuesday, March 13, 2007 11:30 PM -0400 Greg Martin gmartin@gmartin.org wrote:
On the other hand, having a howTo get you started on the road to investigation can be a good thing. For me, the path to LDAP knowledge was not best started with a walk through slapd.conf. A running server with basic config can allow you to investigate LDAP at an appropriate level. You may be "lost" when you get to your first tough question, but you are lost in the middle of a highway with a bunch of signs telling you where to head for answers. No HowTo is created in a vacuum. More knowledge can be found at the end of the google path when you are ready.
Also, when you are trying to learn to fish, you are probably not ready to understand the workings of the reel, how to make lead weights and to tie a perfect knot.
My point is that there is more than one way to learn. Options are good.
But the majority of "How-To" documents I've found via google are just flat-out *wrong*. The only thing they teach people is incorrect ways to set things up, which leads to mass confusion, and complaints to the list about "poor documentation". And getting people to take down and/or fix their erroneous how-to's is nearly impossible.
I agree, but sometimes people don't care and get a thought in their head, "I want to setup OpenLDAP!", follow a howto and they've done it. Now they're OpenLDAP experts ;-)
As long as we work our docs to be the best they can be (I'm sure that's been in a movie before ;-) ), then what else can we do?
Gavin.
--Quanah
-- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Developer ITS/Shared Application Services Stanford University GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html