Re: water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

[will trillich <will@serensoft.com>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 03:01:09PM -0500, Brian Nelson wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 11:10:50AM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > I'll dispute (mildly) the "it's by design" and "we like it that way".  I
> > think part of the issue with GNU/Linux / Unix is that it sort of
> > happened that way -- with some guiding principles.  But it's not crafted
> > or designed so much as evolved.  And it would be preferable to have a
> > gentler introductory curve.
> 
> Well, I would argue that configurability and flexibility are inversely
> proportional to easy of learning.  The more options you have and
> different ways of accomplishing the same thing, the more you have to
> learn.  And since we love the configurability and flexibility of
> linux, we are willing to accept a taller learning curve.  I believe it
> is possible to make the slope gentler, but it is very hard to do
> without making the hill shorter.

aha! you can also gentle-ify the slope by making the hill WIDER.
if the debian.org team had a documentation-supervisor task force
to run eyeballs over the docs to try to compare existing manpages
& such with actual running software -- and update to match,
before a major release -- i'd think it would be WONDERFUL.

now how can we trick some wordsmith people into wanting to do
that?

> I should have said "newbie documentation".  I agree that once you've
> become familiar with Debian, it's very easy to find the documentation
> you're looking for.  With the archives of this list, and all the
> additional non-Debian-specific documentation, there's a plethora of
> documentation out there.
> 
> However, these resources aren't particularly obvious for a newbie.
> Just looking at the documentation section of debian.org alone isn't
> very helpful.
> 
> I can be fairly subjective about this because I've only been using
> Debian for about a month, and my Debian newbie experiences are fresh
> in my mind.  I found initially that I had a bitch of a time finding
> the answers to my questions.  I always did find the answers, but it
> was a struggle.

have you written a 'finding this-n-that on debian: a newbie
howto' yet?

> > Again, most of the Debian defaults are pretty sane.  I tend to roll
> > stuff out and have it work.  Though reading docs is useful, some
> > packages require configuration.   And yes, you have to be there for it.
> 
> Yep, but you're not new to Debian.  You know too much.  ;)  If you are
> new to it, it is quite difficult.

-- 
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will@serensoft.com
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