On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Thomas Peters II wrote: > I guess my point is, we really need a lot more "disclaimers" and "finger > pointing" texts. Something which says "We didn't make the Gimp, XWindows, > esound, etc. These other people made this stuff, go there for support." > This is certainly implied on the web page and in other documents, but it > really isn't spelt out for those who don't know the difference between > authoring software and porting software.
Fair enough, but on the other hand you finish that statment by bringing up my problem with this idea in the first place: to a novice user, it's not unreasonable for them to think "well these people gave me this and I can't get it to work, so they ought to help me." To an extent, I'm sympathetic with that viewpoint: on one hand I don't want to be in a position where I have to explain every niggling detail of how to get X11 working, but then by providing all the components piecemail as Fink does, it does become at least partially necessary to be able to explain what the components are for and how to put them together -- and in fact this consumes a huge chunk of the traffic on the beginners list. Telling users to go look up the docs on Gnome's site isn't necessarily helpful, as most of the info over there is going to be Linux oriented and, though the relationship is obvious to us, the differences may be less so to new users, who can be so busy trying to take everything in that they haven't noticed yet where the boundaries are among major frameworks like Fink, Gnome, Xfree, all the window managers, etc. By providing "one stop shopping" for all that stuff, it's fair to expect us to also provide a bit of "one stop documentation", even if that just means mirroring or linking to detailed, complete material from elsewhere. > IMHO I don't believe Fink has done much more about educating the public > about this than those two, and would quickly fall into the same category > as OpenOSX and MacGimp. We say they aren't providing enough info, and > yet neither are we ...touche... :) > and the major difference is they are getting bad > publicity because they charge money. ...do you not think that's relevant then? Is it wrong to hide behind "you get what you [charge] for"? > Fink just isn't clearly defined to the public, and the short descriptions > out there are already misleading enough to put Fink in the same > undesirable class as OpenOSX. Fair enough. Publicity matters, even if it's a wretched thing. I've seen people slagging off on Fink for, among other reasons, a dislike of '/sw' as a base directory. Pointing out that this is configurable makes some of the hostility less harsh but it's still there. Anyway, as noted in the last mail, I'm willing to help out with documentation. Gotta start somewhere... :) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/ "More war soon. You know how it is." -- mnftiu.cc _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
