I want to help improve the documentation.

Georgiy Treyvus georgiytreyvus at riseup.net
Sat Oct 18 21:37:42 CEST 2014


Hey all,

While I genuinely appreciate your work and GnuPG is great I don't know
how else to put this politely but the core documentation/manual be it
the man or info pages is horrendous. There are many places where it is
either ambiguous or lacks what I feel are critical details. Many things
I found out not from the official documentation but from either trial
and error or from reading tutorials written by others(how they found out
the stuff they teach there I don't know but to them I tip my hat).
There's really something wrong with this picture.

Thus what I'd like to do is help improve the documentation. If I were to
take the time to expand, update, and rewrite more clearly various
portions of the manual bit by bit as my time permits would you folks be
willing to integrate these improvements into the official documentation?
Also it would be nice if all of these submitted improvements were
reviewed to make sure my understanding of the critical facts is
correct(usually it is, but again I can't be sure short of diving into as
the source code, the man/info pages suck, and trial/error experiments
aren't the best at leading to fully correct conclusions). I might not be
able to fix all the problems with the docs but whatever I can fix will
help people especially newer users.

GnuPG is a great piece of software but even the best program in the
world is useless if someone can't easily figure out how to use it.
Documentation is every bit as important as the actual functionality of
the software itself. I'm willing to experiment and get my hands dirty to
an extent. Unfortunately many other users are not and will just say
quite literally "fuck this shit". :-( Though I have managed to get some
of my friends to use crypto my success rate has been been quite dismal.
Only about 5-10% I'm sorry to say. Contrary to all the whining about how
difficult crypto is to use GnuPG and especially other front ends are
quite easy once one gets the feel of them. However for one to get the
feel good, detailed, and unambiguous documentation is needed. Thus I
really want to help improve the documentation. If you folks are willing
to integrate my various rewrites as I send them out that would be truly
great. I want to help with this as it's something that desperately needs
to be done. Please let me know how I can be of help on this front and
how to best integrate myself with the overall workflow here.

Regards,
Georgiy



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