Colin and StephenLet me understand you correctly. You admit the documentation needs improvement and might be slightly un-helpful to noobies. So your solutions are (1) to tell (not ask) the noobie to do fix it (the same one that doesn't know enough about how to use the system) and (2) blame the stupid noobie for is ignorance by not working hard enough.
Solution one will perpetuate the inadequate documentation problem.Solution two will enforce the "Brotherhood of Linux Clubhouse Rules" and perpetuate the frustration of future noobies.
In my two months of seriously "getting down" with debian I have run into the following: -A major installation package was broken in the stable release, and discovered via this list and other sources that the problem was known with no intention to fix it.
-Found packages with no available documentation -Found man pages that did not match executable supplied help.-Found man pages with circular "help" i.e. "foo is foo-like because it is derived from foo's parent" -Discovered the "best support organization" is impatient with frustrated noobies.
Mac <your turn> McCaskie Stephen wrote:
On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 10:23:37AM -0600 or thereabouts, Mac McCaskie wrote: [...]Now that I have your attention.Just get over yourself and look at it from the viewpoint of someone trying to learn a very complicated and disjointed system with an immense amount of mostly barely useful and out-of-date documentation .This is a "so old" argument. There are plenty of commercial, newbie oriented distros available. If you want this, pay for a distro like Mandrake, SuSE, *OR*, roll up your sleeves and ask how you can help in improving the documentation. This is a volunteer effort, Debian is improved by the work and/or support (financial and otherwise). Talk is cheap, so... put your $/work where your mouth is.