[Fwd: Election Results]

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 04:56 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Gavin Henry wrote:
> > <quote who="John Babich">
> >>>
> >> I'm looking forward to them, especially the one on OpenLDAP.
> >> Will that doc also address Fedora Directory Server?
> 
> We can find documentation from the FDS wiki.

Actually, there is very little documentation on the FDS wiki itself
other than a (good) FAQ, feature list, and standard developer
information.  The majority of the "good" documentation is the Red Hat
Directory Server Documentation, which does not offer very good practical
hands-on information that puts it in reach of the majority of Fedora
users.  (It is *very* helpful for enterprise administrators, but they
are less likely to use Fedora solutions for long-term support scenarios
for good reasons.)  Not to mention that none of these Red Hat documents
are licensed in a compatible way content-wise.

> > We don't know anything about FDS, and don't really want to ;-) OpenLDAP is
> > far superior.
> 
> I dont know anything about A but B is definitely better. Amusing. Isn't it?

Actually, this *is* an interesting perspective of many users (of
anything, as a matter of fact), that tends to take root when the vendor
or offering entity doesn't have any clear hooks on which they can "sell"
a product.  This has been written about in a bunch of places, but I
think most recently I've seen it come up tangentially on the "Creating
Passionate Users" blog, which everyone around here should probably check
out -- if only for a couple of priceless articles on good user manuals.

FDS may or may not be fantastic, but it is poorly "marketed" and for
darn sure it doesn't get talked about much.  Quite a lot of that may be
due to the fact that the folks working on it are very busy trying to
make it better and don't have time to do that important user outreach.
Fedora does a pretty good job project-wide on the whole, but even we can
have problems from time to time getting our important messages out.  And
FDS is a weird subproject that hasn't received a lot of love from the
community, and has been more of a "throw it over the wall" contribution,
albeit a really cool one.

I think this is a user perspective that we can actually learn from.
Every opinion is a chance to learn how we can improve outreach.  Well,
*almost* every opinion. :-)

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
      Fedora Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PaulWFrields
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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