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Re: debian-user help idea



On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 10:57:10AM -0500, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 03:29:44AM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote:
> > I was thinking how d-u folks like to have lots of useful facts to help
> > in problem solving. Then I thought how that kind of information is
> > normally sent to the BTS when a user uses 'reportbug'. So I was
> > thinking if someone could redo 'reportbug' to send initial d-u help
> > requests sending useful info so that us helpers dont have to ask 10
> > times for basic stuff .
> > Does this sound vaguely like a useful idea.
> 
> The problem is that for simple threads (ask question, get answer), they
> could be put in a wiki or BTS database, but they are easily searched
> with google, especially if the answer has a [SOLVED] prefex to the
> subject.  Complex threads that end up answer the true question when the
> origional question end up being a red herring would have to get
> re-submitted to a database.  Who will maintain that?
> 
> As for any on-line wiki post a question and someone else will come along
> and answer it, that is for people who have always-on internet.  Many of
> us on DU do not.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Kevin is proposing, but a tool similar 
to reportbug sounds interesting. But ...

In order to get useful stuff it would have to ask a lot of questions. If 
the user can answer those questions by himself he is probably skilled 
enough to send a decent mail to this list (if he didn't solve it already 
via google, RTFM, ...).

Maybe we should start smaller, what info would be interesting for most 
questions (and is not too long)?

cat /etc/debian_version
dpkg --print-architecture
some greping of /proc/cpuinfo and lspci
... what else?

Regards,
Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)

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