[cvs] [Wiki] changed: FAQ/Admin/General

[Wiki Guest]

guest [67.190.113.39]  Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:15:51 -0700

Modified page: http://wiki.horde.org/FAQ/Admin/General
New Revision:  2.2
Change log:  more ranting on documentation

@@ -24,10 +24,12 @@
 Please //do not// contact the developers directly. They usually don't have time to deal with individual installations of Horde and its components, being too busy developing and FAQ-maintaining. (Besides, they're probably on the mailing list anyhow.)
 
 Finally, there is also [http://www.horde.org/consulting/ commercial support] available, with the opportunity to hire Horde developers to install and customize Horde and the Horde applications, or develop custom extensions and modules.
 
-+++ Why is Horde so hard to install?
++++ Why is Horde so hard to install? Why isn't there step-by-step documentation to help me install it?
 We don't make Horde installation a hard task intentionally, we always try to make it easier. One of the strength of Horde and its applications, is the independency from the underlying platform and used backends. The address book Turba, for examplek currently supports 5 different kinds of address book storages, and you can choose from no less than 24 backends for Horde authentication. This makes it possible to integrate Horde in a lot of environments and existing infrastructures, but it also requires more complex configuration. It's a trade off between flexibility and complexity.
+
+In other words, there are millions (if not billions) of different ways to configure Horde based on your local configuration.  Writing documentation that would cover every possible configuration option would be quite a chore for a large software company (i.e. Microsoft, IBM), let alone a volunteer effort with only a small group of core developers.  So while always mindful that are documentation *could* be better (of course it could), we can't do it all by ourselves.  It may be that your setup uses a driver/configuration that is somewhat rare and, therefore, there is a lack of concise documentation on how to configure the exact way you envision.  But on the other hand, the simple fact that a driver/configuration exists for your bizarre testament is also worth something also.  And sharing your experiences with everyone else (through the wiki, mailing lists, etc.) is a fantastic way to give back to the community for using this free software.
 
 +++ Is there a mailing list for Horde and its components?
 Not just //a// mailing list, but //many//. The [http://www.horde.org/mail/ Horde mailing lists], one for each component and then some, and the most active ones are also [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/ archived and searchable].