Andy Smith writes:
Hello, On Sun, Aug 08, 2021 at 11:35:15AM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > any ideas on how to make the situation better? To be honest I don't think that mailing lists are a very good venue for user support and I would these days prefer to direct people to a Stack Overflow-like site. The chief advantages of such sites are that posted problems are narrowed down to contain the required information, and answers are ranked so as to make poor answers (and ultimately, disruptive posters) disappear. Ask Ubuntu. I think, works well.
The primary disadvantage of Q&A-style sites from my limited experience with StackOverflow is that they often fail to recognize XY-problems. Debian-user is pretty good at helping people to re-phrase their question to actually arrive at and solve the underlying question. I have seen numerous Q&A-sites where the immediate problem was answered but the solution was convoluted, insecure or in some other way dissatisfying and that mostly because the initial question was not open enough to allow for the technically correct answer to be given.
There have been a few attempts to set up such sites for Debian, so
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The previous attempts have sort of started as an announcement that such a site is available, but not followed up by any level of advertising on Debian's web site. The announcement threads on the mailing lists then got dominated by arguments from the same small group of people loudly and repeatedly arguing how they would never use or support such a thing. That's fine, but without a way to continually advertise a site as a support venue, it will not get used.
A classic chicken-egg problem :)Also, I think that switching support over to a different medium i.e. from e- mail to Q&A-style will see a different sort of user participating. Hence, the "community" one would find on the Q&A site is not there yet. This explains why it would not be used much (initially) even if there was a lot of advertisement.
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So in summary, I don't think any of the things that would be necessary to improve the way this list works are going to be popular with the regular posters, while starting over with a different solution requires consensus and support from the Debian project that has up until now not been there.
As far as I can tell, Debian's development communication mostly uses e-mail (for bugs, mailing lists, announcements) and IRC (for real-time communication e.g. release testing). Hence it seems only natural that e-mail and IRC would be the primary means to ask for help, too. The idea behind this is (in theory?) that the developers use the same means of communication as the users.
Whether the combination of IRC+e-mail is still “up to date” with practices from younger free software projects can still be debated. I have read articles claiming that participating in Linux kernel development is hard because they are not tracking their development using Github issues whereas most other projects today are easily reachable this way. The same principle could possibly be applied to Debian development, too.
Btw. as of today, at least three types of support channels are advertised: https://www.debian.org/support In that order (not sure if it is related to priority?): IRC, Mailing lists, ForumsWhere does the notion that the mailing list is the primary support channel stem from?
~ ~ ~ There are some unlisted discussion and support channels, too. A community where one can vote up and down: https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/I even tried out Reddit for a few weeks but noticing how much data they collect just by my clicks on up/down and choice of topics to read is quite a revelation. Both, mailing-lists and IRC are in a way more public that everything one sends is published for all to read but also more private in that what one does not intend to send (which messages I read and how long I take for it for instance) stays private.
HTH Linux-Fan öö [...]
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