Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 21:28:15 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> To: Paul Richards <paul@isl.cf.ac.uk> Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: sup: Ok, I'm gonna do it. Message-ID: <29186.791616495@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 01 Feb 95 05:09:56 GMT." <199502010509.FAA01322@isl.cf.ac.uk>
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> I'm not sure this is a good idea. I'm already getting much too much > mail from users who clearly are not capable of running development > code and I'm really not looking forward to that massively increasing > as every new installer takes up your offer to register for sup. Well, we've been here before (the old ``Do we really want to encourage all these newbies??'' argument) and so I'll (hopefully, please please) avoid a rehash by simply saying: We have no choice. 1. As long as we offer sup as a service, people will use it. 2. Using obfuscation as an initiation right tends to backfire - sure, it keeps rank newbies from using it, but it doesn't stop them from asking stupid questions about how to use it. Believe me, the questions don't go away, they just get redirected. 3. Not documenting something allows someone to interpret it any way they want, for both good and ill. If you don't provide a path to sup, then you also can't make sure that most people read a certain amount of doc before they start trying to use it. Most of the problems I get are from people saying ``I have to subscribe to a mailing list? Where the hell does it SAY that??'' and of course I have to answer that it DOESN'T say that! :-) If you think we can keep newbies away by not documenting things then you're living in a fool's paradise. We can't keep them away, we simply get newbies who are more clueless than even they have to be! :-) > You've got to be kidding. The number of times a make world actually > runs, from beginning to end, flawlessly are few and far between. > People *will* try and do this if you offer it to them during installation > and in all likelyhood it'll fall flat on its face most of the time. You're not reading my mail about update procedures then. This state of affairs is NOT ACCEPTABLE, and arguing that we can't go from point A to point B because there's always been this big, ugly dog standing in the middle of the road is just no substitute for finally getting up and scaring that dog away! :-) Seriously, this whole attitude of ``We can't let them into our inner sanctum! They'll do bad things!'' just has to stop. It's counter-productive, and the plain fact of the matter is that we ARE EXPORTING THESE SOURCES! FreeBSD-current is available on dozens of archive sites, and unless you also propose to yank -current out of the mainstream entirely then there's no excuse for not trying to make it work as seamlessly as possible. More importantly, and no matter what my and your feelings about it may be, it's what OUR USERS HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR! We cannot pretend to be a real operating system environment while continuing to ignore such long-stated needs so blatantly. I'll be even more contraversal: We either go for much more serious quality in our documentation and presentation or we will go the way of UNIX everywhere - slowly and painfully into ancient history. I bring up OS/2 Warp and it brings up the IBM Library manager. I bring up FreeBSD and it gives me.. A prompt. Sorry, but that just leaves me cold. I thought command-line interfaces were cool about 12 years ago, but I've grown up since then.. :-) Jordan
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