On 5/25/05, Russ Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have not posted my opinion of the IRC crowd. I merely posted some > evidence that they were, one one particular occasion, completely > full of shit. People can make their own decisions about whether > to generalize.
Rationalize. One out of how many? We are not talking all or nothing. > I think reading the FAQ, poking around the Wiki, and then > asking on 9fans is a much more reliable way to go. Sure, but a lot of folks that we meet on IRC rush into Plan 9 and hit hurdles during the install/configuration process. Then they want answers, so they go to IRC for a quick remedy. We are the first response team for their answers. I do not believe that the folks volunteering to help on IRC are out to misguide people intentionally. Granted a few tend to be a little overzealous at times, but not always. I am not certain that telling the consumer that he/she should go to a mailing list for the quick answer is always the best solution. It seems that IRC will alleviate the problem sooner. Granted if the question is more technical, it should go to 9fans. I'll meet you half way and say that if one of our volunteers berates one of the newbies, I'll ban the offender from the #plan9 channel. I'll even go the extra mile to have them banned from freenode. We could go with a no tolerance approach, or a 3 strikes and your out approach. > Poking around the IRC logs from the first week of May, > I have learned that the /sys/src/9 kernels have no > SCSI support (only /sys/src/fs does) and that there is > no way for acme to pipe the current buffer through a > program. Sometimes, when such misinformation is stated > as fact, someone is around to correct it. But just as often > it seems that no one is around to correct it. And if you're > a newbie and you get the latter, I don't believe that you've > done better than asking on 9fans and waiting a little while. It's a fact of life that people make mistakes. If we hit an 85 percent accuracy rate then we are doing great. Most weather forecasters don't do that well. -vester
