Bug#849827: live-build fails to build amd64 target

And here goes the live-build community once more into a meltdown.

Peter, I haven't seen your name in many, if any, discussions before this so take this from someone who has been a part of the user community for many many years.
Your attitude and method of communication alienates yourself from people wanting to take their time to help you. Live-build has, while I have been a user, always been a volunteer community.

As users we file bug reports and make comments without fear or favour. Yes there has been a few times where the response has seemed quite short but this is the internet and reading tone into replies is a dangerous thing. It is the words used that matter and injecting tone is something the reader does not the writer. The words you have used are pre-empting a stern reply by suggesting you will get a brush off rather than any help, what a great way to make friends and influence people.

In other words please don't come here telling this community we are doing it all wrong if you are not in any way shape or form willing to offer assistance.

Just my $0.02 in reply to yours.

On 2 January 2017 at 09:09, Ben Armstrong <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca> wrote:

On January 1, 2017 4:47:39 PM "Peter.Stein" <peter.stein@comcast.net> wrote:

> I actually had a bunch of comments, but suspected they would not be well
> received

Try us.

>

and thus tried to be diplomatic

I must have missed that. ;)

>

and productive by suggesting a
> step-by-step HOWTO. It's needed, everyone knows what one is, and
> shouldn't be difficult to put together by the live-build experts. You
> wanted an improvement suggestion and I gave you a very "actionable" one.

I know how many hundreds of hours of my personal time went into the original document before I called it quits and doubt your assessment of the ease of replacing the current doc. Since it's "incomprehensible", it seems it all needs to be replaced from scratch ... or was that hyperbole, perhaps?

> I'm always reluctant to get into these "improvement" discussions because
> the fact of the matter is you open source folks don't take constructive
> criticism very well and invariably end up copping an attitude - like you
> are now. I've developed software professionally for 35 years and can
> state unequivocally that this documentation does not meet the
> "production grade" standard.

I am not "you open source folks". I'm a person with feelings, not a bundle of stereotypes. I'm particularly not impressed by you "pulling rank" by trotting out your "senior developer" status when I haven't seen a single line of code or sentence of doc contributed by you to this project. Show me the code (or doc).

>

I hear what you're saying about limited
> resources and community efforts, but as the old saying goes "the road to
> hell is paved with good intentions". At some point somewhat needs to
> step back, take a deep breath, and do an honest assessment to determine
> what if any improvements are needed.

I was that someone. I did that assessment, and this is what, within a reasonable amount of time, I managed to accomplish to cut through the information-dense manual and try to guide any new user through getting oriented. I hope you've read it and tried at least this "crash course" outline. If you did, please tell me what you thought of it:

https://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/live-manual/stable/manual/html/live-manual.en.html#8

I know it's just a small thing, but it's what time and energy allowed in lieu of a more ambitious total rewrite, which I was painfully aware was needed, but lacked the resources to carry out.

But that day has come and gone. What's left of the team is just keeping this doc, and live-build itself on life support. The main thrust of development is now in live-wrapper. So my honest assessment is: live-manual is imperfect, but it's the doc we have. If it falls short of your expectations, it falls on you, the users who still care about it, to make it better, because it's not likely anyone else will. That's not "copping an attitude". That's just giving you my experienced opinion on the state of things.

>

Griping from the user community
> should not be the impetus for change. That's my $.02. ;-)

So if you truly believe that, switch from griping to contributing!

Ben