[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
HOWTO's For The Newbie
>>>>> "Ross" == Ross Henderson <ros.h [at] virgin.net> writes:
>> But back to your point. Who's going to write those HOWTOs?
>> You don't want newbies writing HOWTOs ...
Ross> why? please bear in mind that most newbies are only new to
Ross> 'linux' and are not fools. once they gain enough insight
Ross> into the world of linux, there is no reason why they should
Ross> not share that experiance with others.(granted, it must be
Ross> monitored by peer's prior to publication)
Because they don't have the perspective. Newbies can and do maintain
FAQ lists; typically they are excellent at it because they are full of
enthusiasm. But HOWTOs are expected to handle various setups in a
coherent way. Today this often means understanding different hardware
and distros. As Al correctly points out, sometimes this doesn't
matter; with sendmail it probably doesn't. But a newbie can't be
expected to make that distinction with authority.
And HOWTOs are _the_ place that experienced Linux hackers look first
when they enter (for them) uncharted waters. If the proportion of
HOWTOs written by newbies were very large, reading HOWTOs would become
a deprecated skill.
>> But surely you don't expect me to hose my book royalties by
>> targeting my HOWTO at people I don't know, will never meet as
>> peers, and who will never contribute anything except revenue to
>> any projects I care deeply about?
Ross> don't be so quick to judge others by your own morral
I'm not "judging" anyone by "moral standards." I'm simply saying I'm
not going to throw my efforts where they will not have some return to
me. I'm saying I know a lot of people from experienced developer,
new-to-Linux up to Certified Net God who feel the same way. Helping
developers who work on projects we care about do a better job has
'net-wide impact, and makes us names, and maybe a shot at making money
on those names. Helping anonymous newbies gives one a warm glow, but
it's a lot warmer when you know their names.
Ross> standards! i admit i am making as much use of 'sheflug' as i
Ross> can to get my pc configured the way i want but, that does
Ross> not mean i do not intend to make any meaningful contribution
Of course you do. But have you asked me what I want? You have not.
I don't see any reason why you should. You'll do something that you
want to do, and think you can do well. Great! But I somehow doubt
it's writing tables for a Japanese locale database. I want to target
my efforts at people who will have direct impact on getting that
locale database written. Or who work on projects whose products I
use.
Or people whose names I know. Like you, Ross.
Ross> in return. you may well find that most newbies do not
Ross> contribute because they were unable to get sufficient help
Ross> in the early stages(even if it's only being pointed in the
Ross> direction of a man page or howto) and so become disenchanted
Ross> with the whole idea of 'linux'
As far as I can tell, that's simply false. Even those who have
abandoned Linux to return to their beloved Macs, or to Windows for
lack of anything else, have been amazed and gratified by the response
of our community to their needs. It just wasn't sufficient to keep
them; they needed apps we don't provide, or turn-key ease of use we
can't provide yet.
My point is that although I'm willing to spend some time helping out
on things that don't directly pay me back (except with personal
gratitude and general open source community growth, benefits that I
value highly), it is unlikely that 99.44% of the Linux users in the
world will ever pay me back where I would notice it. Most of you
don't care about internationalization, or multilingual applications,
or standards conformance, or functional programming languages. Why
should you? On the other hand, I don't care about MP3s, video4linux,
ISDN, xmms skins, the Gimp, Enlightenment "themes", electronic circuit
design, arcade or other action games, screensavers, WYSIWYG
wordprocessors, etc.
One thing we all have in common, though, is the system admin aspect of
dealing with these application areas: installation, configuration,
upgrading, removing. And that's why most HOWTOs are written for
experienced users by experienced users.
>> It's not clear that having high expectations of "newbies" when
>> they are using an industrial strength OS is unreasonable, any
>> more than having higher expectations for lorry drivers than for
>> bicyclists is unreasonable.
Ross> i think you may be missing one major point here....... linux
Ross> needs to be used by the masses to continue to increase it's
Ross> rate of development. because of this, newbies must not be
Ross> tolerated, but welcomed and encouraged as much as possible.
No, I understand that point. I just don't know if I see increasing
the rate of development as a goal at this time. Personally, I want to
see quality given emphasis, while filling in some of the
functionality.
The Linux kernel has now reached a critical mass where nobody, not
Linus and not Alan, knows even broadly what everything is doing. Many
user-level projects (X11 and the Emacsen for one) have long been at
that stage. This has been hell on quality control in those projects.
And some of the more popular recent developments have been hell on
related projects. The Enlightenment sound daemon is a case in point.
Its use of interrupts and signals is, well, Windows-like. It's very
hard to use in an environment where the assumption that it is
available might be false. And there's no spec, so nobody knows what
it might do next. IMHO, the effort that went into its creation would
have been much better spent on improving one of the existing packages
(my favorite is NAS which has many of the same capabilities as esd but
is much more environmentally friendly, but Xaudio and rsound also have
their advocates).
Why should home users care? Well, because this trend could easily
stifle itself, or cause forks. Working out conflicts between poorly
managed projects wastes core developer time. Etc, etc. Even within
Microsoft you see these problems (some of the things I've heard about
what IE developers say about the Word group would bear repeating if
only I had permission to do so); in the bazaar they are far more
problematic. In fact, some serious observers see them as _the_
obstacle to widespread adoption of open source methodology (see
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Research/OSS/McConnell-PrimeTime.pdf).
>> Certainly, there will be a few dedicated people like yourself
>> writingHOWTOs f or the new newbie. But are you sure that your
>> effort wouldn't be better put into putting that knowledge into
>> a script that only Perl would ever read? The Home Users, as
>> you describe them, don't _want_ to read HOWTOs. They want
>> things to "just work".
Ross> i for one, appreciate the efforts of anyone prepared to make
Ross> the effort to help the new linux users.
But you're showing symptoms of being a traditional newbie, not a new
newbie. You want to make your system do things your way; if you
didn't want that, you wouldn't be using Linux at home. Getting over
the jargon hump, and learning that controlling the flexibility of a
modern system requires a lot more effort than learning to change your
window manager's color schemes is not a new problem. We all went
through it.
It's just not clear to me that writing time-saving applications (like
RPM as in another thread here, and config scripts) to do routine admin
tasks isn't a better use of experienced users' time than writing
HOWTOs targeted at the current state of people who will in short order
be experienced users able to sling acronyms, save whole file systems
in the process of being `rm -rf /'d using only built-in commands from
the Bourne shell, and flame on about different licenses.
I guess we do need a HOWTO-HOWTO, which explains how to grok HOWTOs
and man pages and TeXInfo docs. (Well, we have one, but it's about
HOWTO _write_ HOWTOs, not HOWTO read them!) There's a
Reading-List-HOWTO, but that's not quite right. There's the Jargon
File (aka the New Hacker's Dictionary, http://www.tuxedo.org/) but
that's more about what words like "grok" and "recursive acronym" mean,
than about HOWTO read man pages. Maybe we should call it the
Grok-HOWTO. :-)
I could write _that_, that would be _cool_. Hmm, let's review some of
the docs and I'll get back to you on that....
--
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________
What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word
"unsubscribe" in the body of the message.
GNU the choice of a complete generation.