Opinions sought on how to improve software releases.
 

To be more specific.

I just answered a question from an individual having problems (so he thought) installing mysql. His problem: after starting mysqld, he got the command line prompt instead of the mysql prompt. Reason for the problem: he didn't realize that adding & to the end of the mysqld command started it in background and gave back the command line prompt instead of the mysql prompt.

It's a simple problem, but perhaps the documentation could have been better written to point that out.

So. Here's my question, for vendors of freeware, shareware, and commercial ware.

Why not ask the many bulletin boards devoted to users of operating systems/software to add a new category: Vendors.

Let the vendors offer their software for testing (freeware probably unlimited; shareware and commercial ware probably time limited). Especially, ask the volunteer testers to thoroughly read and try the documentation, and suggest corrections/additions to make the documentation better so that vendors/users can be confident that there will be few, if any, problems resulting from poorly written documentation.

Your opinions don't affect me; I just hope that vendors, webmasters, etc., will read this, and the responses, and try it out. They, and more importantly we, just may like it.

i don't really see where you're going with this. it's not mysql's place to teach their users how to use bash.