On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 08:14:23 -0700 (PDT)
Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command
> "apropos", even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude,
> and apt-get come up for "apropos install" or "apropos setup".
I do believe they are mentioned several times in the manual. Y'know, that
thing collecting dust over yonder.
> It hurts because it scares users.
And?
> You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more
> computer illiterate users than geeks.
And? There are a slew of other OSs and Linux distributions as well.
This is what always gets me in discussions that are based on the lowest
common denominator in computer users; the presumption that everyone wants to
cater to them.
It has been my experience that packages that cater to the lowest common
denominator are packages I don't care to use because I find them *hard to use*
even though they purport to be "easy to use". I have almost always been on
the side of the scale where I preferred the "harder" package because in the
long run, once I got over the nominal learning curve, it was easier to use.
However there was always that drive to go for the lowest common denominator,
the computer illiterate. It has ruined more programs that I care to list
because they would add too much, dumb things down, make the program too large
and hard-to-use in the quest to get people who have to ask "Left or right
click" after the first time you tell them to right-click something. IE,
people with no concept of "default behaviors/actions".
I have never, EVER understood why anyone would want to take a package
which is beloved by the niche geek market and destroy it for the illiterate
market. That is triply so for commercial packages.
You're wrong in saying that we (in general) would gain more by making our
package (program, OS, etc) more palatable to the neophyte. As I said above,
there are a slew of OSs and distributions that cater to that segment. To move
Debian into that realm would be to lose what it has and compete with
established entities. 100% of this slice is better than <1% of *that* slice.
> Just to clarify, I've nothing against verbosity itself. /var/log, for
> instance, is great (although "var" is a historical name that really
> should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another
> story). The problem is verbosity when things don't go wrong.
Erm, no, it should not be. While it is a historical name it is a name
that should remain because every person who's ever worked on a Unix-like
system during that history knows where /var is, why it is there and what is in
it. It is up to those new people to catch up, not for us to ruin what works
and works well in the vain attempt to catch more of a market which, in the
end, doesn't really matter as this is not a commercial venture.
> I'm all for a "tell me what is going on" feature for debugging.
Which is why you need verbosity when nothing is going wrong. Let's see a
show of hands on this situation.
Ya boot up a Windows box post after '95. Here's the sum of it letting you
know something is going on: a rotating palette for the bar at the bottom. The
palette stops rotating. So, uh, what's wrong? Oh, wait, it started rotating
again. No, wait, it stopped again... for 30 seconds. No, there it goes, it's
fine.
> 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. Error messages are
there for people who know what they need to do. 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.
> The first option I'm faced with is:
> * 0. [A]ccess Choose the access method to use.
> I have no idea what that means. I tried using it (not logged in as
> root) and I got the following message:
Did you choose it to find out?
> dselect: requested operation requires the superuser privilege
> Yet another example of an obscure error message. :-)
Uh, no, it isn't. Superuser, aka, root. But not always root. sudo can
grant superuser access w/o root. Also any account with a uid of 0 has
superuser access but that doesn't mean it is called root. I recall one job
where we had root and jfroot. Both were uid 0 but they had different
passwords. Don't ask me why we had to 0s w/different passwords. Didn't make
sense to me then, doesn't make sense to me now.
But the really ironic part about all this is that the above message is
more of the "plain english" message you want. Root is jargon. Yank someone
off the street and ask them two questions:
On a unix system, what does root do?
On a unix system, what does the superuser do?
A geek'll answer both the same. A moron who can't think his way out of a
wet paper bag won't be able to figure out either one. Someone who has a
decent brain and actually stops to think a minute might be able to puzzle out
"super user would be a user with more power, like superman has more power than
a man." Ain't no puzzling out root. Root what? Root of the file system?
Root of the process table? The cables that come out of the computer and are
so tangled they resemble roots?
--
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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