[asterisk-users] RFC -- Improving the quality of the mailinglists

[Wilton Helm]

>There are far better resources out there for teaching Linux
>newbies.  Instead, voip-info.org attempts to provide the sorts of information
>that is useful for those already familiar with Linux

I can appreciate that.  And I can appreciate being at the other end of the pipe, as I like to gloss over all "obvious" details when I have to write up something.  I'm not suggesting that VoIP should become a Linux tutorial, but that, where possible, every line that must be typed to get to a desired end be explicitly included rather than assuming that a one sentence comment will empower the reader to type in a whole page of bash stuff.

>You could certainly compare and contrast the documentation for other
>large daemon applications

I would concur with your thoughts here.  The terse style is endemic to everything Linux.  I bought a commercial Linux app recently and it didn't even have a single word about installation.  Turns out there was no configuration, so you could just drop it into a directory and make a shortcut icon if you were using Gnome or something.  But at least a line stating that would have saved the author an E-Mail exchange..Oh yes, and then there was the library it needed that wasn't in the distro.  It would have been useful if the Readme mentioned that.  Anyway, you get the point.

>It's certainly instructive that the continuing advances in
>open source browser technology was what spurred Microsoft to once again
>invest time into its own browser 

True, but I can open IE and use it and then open Firefox and intuitively know what to do.  It doesn't say you can use Z or -M or --Query all to do the same thing, (possibly with identical parameters, or possibly with parameters formatted differently) but -M only works on Fedora and --Query only works on Suse (contrived by true to life examples).  It is this sort of thing that makes the Linux learning curve steep and makes it challenging to provide detailed instructions for something like installing a package.

Based on a number of conversations over the last year or two, I have become convinced that those for whom these command automatically flow off of their fingertips are mostly clueless as to how unintuitive some of this stuff is when first encountered.

Wilton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20090127/0653c02b/attachment.htm