Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Steve Lamb 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.
What manual?
I receieved the machine with Debian preinstalled and no offline
documentation except a post it note with the root username and password.
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.
Typing "help" at the command line, which to most new users would seem like
a sensible starting point, gives very terse information about bash and
shell commands. (The bit at the top of this does mention 'man', but it
scrolls off the top of my screen so it's not that helpful to a new user
who doesn't know about Shift + Page Up.)
The only manual I was aware of was "apropos" and "man". But as I said in
another message, neither "apropos install" nor "apropos setup" lead the
user to look at any of apt-get, dselect, or aptitude.
>> It hurts because it scares users.
>
> And?
>From a usability point of view, scaring users is a bad thing.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> although "var" is a historical name that really should be replaced by
>> something more user friendly, but that's another story
>
> 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.
Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. 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?
>> 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.
Right. That's poor UI. However, it's not _that_ much better on Debian:
Incomprehensible status message #1.
Incomprehensible status message #2.
Incomprehensible status message #3.
(long pause)
Incomprehensible status message #4.
Incomprehensible status message #5.
Incomprehensible status message #6.
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.
...all of which are taken directly from my boot log.
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".
>> 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.
It is, however, a little better than:
404 Error
Resource unavailable
...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.)
> 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"?
> 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.
>> 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?
As I said above, I tried using it, yes. I got this message:
>> 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. [...]
How about a message such as:
dselect: to select an installation source, superuser privileges are required (try logging in as root)
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.)
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
community.
--
Ian Hickson )\._.,--....,'``. fL
"meow" /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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