Oh, look, someone else who CCs when it is obvious the person they're
responding to is participating right here.
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 09:55:59 -0700 (PDT)
Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Steve Lamb wrote:
> What manual?
I rest my case.
> I receieved the machine with Debian preinstalled and no offline
> documentation except a post it note with the root username and password.
And this is the problem of Debian... how? I would ask why you weren't
given better help from the person who installed it or why you didn't ask them
for help. The facilities are there.
> On other systems (Mac OS X, Windows XP, etc) I am clearly shown where to
> look for more information (on Windows, in fact, the OS goes to the other
> extreme and tries to ram help down your throat), but on Debian, there was
> no clear path to the documentation.
And on my install the same is true. KDE menu, Help.
> >> It hurts because it scares users.
> > And?
> From a usability point of view, scaring users is a bad thing.
Ever hear the saying "Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about its
friends." You missed my entire point. Debian isn't scaring off users. It is
scaring off *neophyte* users. However, that segment of the population is
covered by *other distributions*. This is a *good thing* as Debian often
attracts users with some experience who want exactly what it has to offer.
> And I'm a geek, one who has been using GNU-based distributions on multiple
> machines on a daily basis for at least 3 years, and Sun for 6 years before
> that, and I _still_ have difficulty. This should be ringing usability
> alarm bells.
No, it shouldn't. I should be ringing alarms about the veracity of your
claims and your capabilities.
> Being usable does not mean catering for the lowest common denominator; I
> fully agree that other distributions are more adequately positioned to
> target computer illiterate users.
Debian is quite usable. *NO* computer system, however, is going to be
completely intuative to someone who is handed it with nothing more than "Here,
here's the username and password. g'luck!" Quick, tell me, how do you get
more software for Windows? Help doesn't point you to TUCOWS or the like.
> Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude.
No, it is selfish for people to come into a culture and flat out state,
"No, I don't want to learn so things should change to cater to ME!"
> The number of future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number
> of existing users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or
> debian itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced
> to learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks,
> instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions?
Because they're not that hard to learn and the easier conventions are not
"easier" in any quantifiable sense of the word. Furthermore any system you,
or anyone else, would propose would cause no end of upheaval to the software
that ran on it. It would take years to make any meaningful shift and in the
end guess what would happen. New users would still have to learn where
everything goes.
> Right. That's poor UI. However, it's not _that_ much better on Debian:
Quite the contrary.
> By "Incomprehensible status message" I mean things like:
>
> bootlogd.
> Activating swap.
> fsck 1.35-WIP (01-Aug-2003)
> Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done.
> Please contribute if you find this software useful.
> DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
> Starting Xprint servers: Xprt.
If the pause were after fsck and it was showing that it was checking the
disk that would let me know the machine is doing something. If the pause is
after DHCPDISCOVER I can surmise that if the network isn't hooked up then it
is waiting for a timeout there.
Furthermore if I am calling up to my dad who is 400 miles away and doesn't
know all that much about Linux he can read me the lines and I can tell him
likely causes of problems and pauses. Try that with "See, about 12 seconds
into bootup the little bar stops rotating for about 30 seconds."
Like I said, those messages aren't meant for the neophytes. The neophytes
aren't going to get it either way. They're there for the people that have to
fix it when it breaks which may be through the interface of the neophyte. Do
you REALLY think I want to walk my father through turning on boot-up logging
on his Windows box, have it boot, then talk him, through booting into safe
mode and *then* have him drill down to where the log would be? Yeah, that's
easy alright.
> Why can't we instead have nice friendly messages? e.g.:
> Startup logging has begun. Log will be stored in '/var/log/boot'.
> ...instead of "bootlogd".
Because when it breaks what do you fix? What mechanism logs? Oh, the
user's going to have to find that out. When it says "bootlogd failed" it is
clear what happened. BOOTLOGD FAILED! LOOK FOR REFERENCES ON THE NET AND IN
MAN FOR BOOTLOGD!
> >> Even then, though, it would be nice if the verbose messages were
> >> consistently formatted, and used plain english instead of jargon.
> >> Error messages like "E: Invalid operation foo" are not helpful.
> > No, that's a bad idea. Take a look at IE's 404 message sometime. It's
> > a dumbed down version which doesn't explain jack or shitte.
> Again, IE's 404 message is terrible UI. It is much, much too long and is
> not very helpful.
Exactly. So who gets to decide what is too verbose? You? Me? The
Mata-freaking-Hari?
> It is, however, a little better than:
> 404 Error
> Resource unavailable
Which is all you need. What's wrong? The resource you requested isn't
available. Why is it called that? I dunno, you think Universal RESOURCE
Locater, AKA, URL, have anything to do with the choice of words? Well, if the
Universal RESOURCE Locater points you to a RESOURCE and that RESOURCE is
unavailable what do you expect the error message to be?
404 Error
Want some milk and cookies while they SysAdmin figures it out?
> ...which is what some servers send back. (What would be better would be
> for browsers to leave 404 messages alone but for servers to return more
> useful messages, such as w3.org's 404 message, which contains some
> site-specific information.)
And also basic trouble-shooting which is not up to servers to teach the
general public.
> > Error messages are there for people who know what they need to do.
> So if I do something wrong (like get the command line arguments to
> 'apt-get' wrong, as I did), then I don't deserve to be helped by the
> program? What would be wrong with a helpful message, such as:
> apt-get: the first argument should be one of 'install', 'remove',
> 'update', or another operation
> ...instead of just "E: Invalid operation foo"?
The latter. You'd think that a person harping on help would have read the
help of apt-get before choosing it as an example.
{grey@teleute:~} apt-get help
apt 0.5.8 for linux i386 compiled on Jul 25 2003 20:40:51
Usage: apt-get [options] command
^^^^^^^^^
root@teleute:~# apt-get -s install pan
^^
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
pan is already the newest version.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 258 not upgraded.
Perfectly valid and install is the second command-line argument, not the
first. The error tells you it was wrong. Up to you to figure out what's
right which isn't hard at all.
> > People who don't know what they need to do will not have that knowledge
> > suddenly imparted upon them by a "plain english" error message because,
> > without the jargon to point you in the right direction, there would be
> > absolutely no place to start.
> I'm not asking for pre-school English here.
And I never said that would be the level. But no plain english error
message that is devoid of jargon will inform the person any more because they
don't understand either way. However the jargon conveys quickly and concisely
the problem to people who do understand. It also provides quick keywords to
do a search on the 'net. I cannot count the number of times I've Googled for
a problem using an exact match on a terse error message and found the exact
answer... usually as the first link.
> How about a message such as:
> dselect: to select an installation source, superuser privileges are
> required (try logging in as root)
'to select an installation source'
Superfluous, we know what we had been trying to do, why repeat it?
'superuser privileges are required'
Which is what we said
'(try logging in as root)'
We just said that, not needed.
> It's still accurate, but now it's helpful as well, and uses a more
> friendly voice. (This also changes "access method" to "installation
> source", which makes more sense to me.)
And is completely inaccurate. The access method describes, well, the
method of accessing a repository. "FTP" is not a repository, it is a way to
access it. Just like "HTTP", "CD" and others are.
> Incidentally, I'm no UI expert, as I'll be the first to admit.
> Unfortunately we don't seem to have many of those in the free software
Which I consider a blessing because unlike where those vile beasts have
popped up their head I am quite able to do work quickly and efficiently
without having to fight the UI and puzzle over uninformative error messages.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
| -- Lenny Nero - Strange Days
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