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Subject:RE: What I recently heard? From:"Sue Ahrenhold" <SAhrenhold -at- IpdSolution -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 14 Nov 2002 11:40:11 -0500
Sean Hower reports: <<i recently heard someone say the following: "I'd
almost rather have it [the content of docs] be consistent and be wrong, than
to have documents that aren't consistent." i didn't really know how to
respond to this. I was kind of dumbfounded actually. What's a good way to
respond to such a statement?>>
Well, if you're maintaining a multi-book documentation set, and a function was changed, and the writer fixed it in the "one" place where they knew this function was described, but there are references in other parts of the documentation set that the writer didn't know about (or may have even been told that there was no time to go and look for references)
and then you get a bug saying that the documentation is incorrect, and you look, and the documentation is correct, but you aren't looking in the place where the bug is refering to ...
well, you get my point.
I don't think the person Sean overheard was indicating a desire for documents to be wrong, but, if something is wrong, it must be fixed everywhere. It's easier to KNOW that something needs to be changed, and that you'll get to it in the next release, than to worry that you may have made a hash of changes, because you had no time to fix it.
PS - not referring to a simple change here, but one of those -- we have miles to go before we sleep rewrites.
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