Taming the mailing lists

Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Fri Apr 30 05:39:26 UTC 2004


On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 11:27:16PM +0100, Hugh Foster wrote:
> 
> This list has been an absolute lifesaver for me grappling with the
> Penguin in a Microsoft-saturated company. Three times I've posted
> questions - yes, dim-witted noob questions, but show-stoppers for me.
> And every time I've had answers that worked quicker than looking it up
> in Help.

Well "quicker than looking it up in Help" is a problem for the list.  If
you have not looked for the answer then posting is the lazy way that
abuses the shared commons that is this list.

If you cannot find it then there is a bug in help and a good reason to
post a question.  Also help systems should not be painful as they are
today.  The reality of help systems is that they demand a foundation
vocabulary that takes some effort.  Spelling class -- look it up in
the dictionary comes to mind.

My impression of the quality wizzard class replies is that they are
looking up most of the content.  The difference is that they know what
to look for, how to look or just finished the research for some other
reason.

For Fedora to gain acceptance the product needs to progress from
cult/ wizzard to more facilitating of users helping themselves.
Check this out for a giggle:

   http://it.seek.com.au/showjob.asp?jobid=3525153

Since the last cycle of FC2 test is in progress think about
bugzillaing productive bugs on specific man pages or help documents
that would have helped you.  Man page changes are safe places for an
engineer to work when things are working.

"apropos ld" tells me that the old ways are history.  Try:

    # apropos ld| wc 



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	/dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.





More information about the fedora-list mailing list