Re: stable-testing-unstable (Re: Newest kde onto stable)
Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote:
My idea was to first host it on a private website and correct all the
mistakes. Once it becomes good enough, we can integrate it to the Debian
website.
Sounds like the right idea. There's no copyright notice or anything
similar - you could give the Debian FAQ maintainers the explicit right
to cut and paste chunks into their document if they want to.
I corrected this. But when it points debian-user mailing list, I
retained the smaller case letter instead of Debian-user. I dont know
which one is correct. Can someone tell me what is the correct way to
refer to debian-user mailing list?
"debian-user", with lower case, would be correct.
> "Read this debian FAQ": why? There's no more information there than
there is in your FAQ. The place it points, by the way, is precisely
where your FAQ should be incorporated, or rather linked to. Unlike that
page, however you should be avoiding talking about "dists directory",
since that means nothing to an average user.
The idea behind this link is that If a new user happens to stumble upon
my FAQ (say through google search etc.,), I wanted to point out where
the real Debian FAQ is. Ofcourse the hint is subtle, but in one of the
feedbacks I received, one user told me that the link was very useful.
It is indeed, I'm just not sure this is the place for it. It should be
linked to in any place that it contains useful further reading on the
topic being discussed. In this particular case, it doesn't provide any
real additional information. As opposed to...
> When talking about Woody, Sarge and Sid, it'd be good to have a more
in-depth description of why there's a bunch of independent names and
where they come from (particularly the fact that Sid is special and
invariant while Woody and Sarge are not).
>
This is answered in Q. 5.3 of the official Debian FAQ. This is another
reason for the link to official Debian FAQ. I did not want to duplicate
information in both the places.
...this is the kind of place where you want to have a link to the FAQ.
And by the way, there's no reason not to link to it in multiple places.
You're right that it's best not to duplicate something that's already
well documented.
> "pointing the sources.list to": Should be "sources.list file",
although "/etc/apt/sources.list file" would make things more clear. But
at this stage you've already lost a bunch of newbies, who wouldn't know
where to find a sources.list file, what to do with it if they did, and
what it might do to their system if they did do something with it. Find
the bit of real documentation for that feature and link to it. This is
not the page for such technical details.
Can someone familiar with Knoppix provide me such a link? All I can find
through google is a link to a wiki. But a wiki is subjected to change
over time and I would prefer not to link to a wiki. Is there any other
good link?
You want to link to a page with a big "What is Knoppix" paragraph on it.
The Knoppix front page should be enough, http://www.knoppix.org/.
Annoyingly, it doesn't seem to be possible to link directly to the
English version :-(
BTW, does anyone know a good link for knoppix mailing lists?
The current link is actually suggested by one of the knoppix user. If
there is a better link, I would be happy to incorporate.
No idea, sorry.
> "The best solution would be to ask a friend who runs Debian". And if
none of their friends run Debian, they should install Windows, right? It
should never, *ever* be necessary to "ask around" in order to
successfully install Debian: it should all be documented. It should be
documented in this very document in fact.
In an FAQ of this nature, all we can do is give pros and cons of each
process. We cannot obviously say for sure which is the wrong/correct
decision. A local Debian guru would be able to give a solid decision for
a newbie.
The idea behind the above statement is that the newbie actually finds
some debian buddies among his friends. In case there are any problems,
they can always turn to them. Most of my friends come to me first when
they have a Debian related problem instead of going to the mailing lists
or reading documentation. I dont blame them for it, it just happens that
way.
That's a reasonable point. I guess I have two responses:
* Debian users are a tiny, tiny minority in this world. I would hope
and expect that the majority of users who install Debian don't know
anyone else who's even heard of Debian. For these users, putting that
sentence first makes it sound like they need more support than is really
the case: it makes it sounds like they've already got one black mark
against them. It might discourage them from trying to do things on
their own.
* Not every Debian user is equally qualified to give advice. In fact,
the average experienced Debian user tends to throw out advice like "edit
the /etc/resolv.conf by hand, then you can just fire up a cron job that
calls a perl script to keep it up to date. Don't forget to rebuild your
module DB!" by reflex. Newbies should avoid these people like the plague.
I actually could not think of better way to explain. So I just took your
exact words and patched my original html file. I hope that is fine.
Be my guest.
changed to "less likely to have any bugs."
:-)
Not easy enough for a newbie. You need to spend some time just to make
sure that everything is fine. The main issue is with the configuration
files. Read the second paragraph in the answer.
True.
Yes and that is why the answer starts with "My personal order of
preference...." The word personal is very important here :-)
Fair enough.
Cheers,
Mat
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