> His post was not particularly helpful either, IMO. We know the upgrade > situation is bad and don't really need people bitching at us about it, > really. There was nothing that helped me as a fink developer in his > post. Other than to make me understand why ChrisP quit working on fink > last year. :) But his post was helpful in pointing out that there needs to be a little more quality control in terms of the user-friendliness in Fink. I believe that it was constructive criticism meant to help, not just plain bitch.
We know that all of the developers are volunteers and have lives outside of Fink. You all deserve a lot of respect and admiration for the overall superb job that you're doing. Plus you are usually very helpful on the mailing lists to us newbies who are having problems. However, there has to be a certain sense of pride that extends to usability. I wrote a message here a couple of days ago about how poorly documented most UNIX apps are. I said that most of the man pages were written by developers for developers. In my opinion, that attitude is outdated and elitist. The Mac has always been the computer for "the rest of us." The rest of us are those who didn't want to or couldn't learn arcane and esoteric DOS commands, or use really bad software on PCs. I believe it still holds true today, especially with the Switchers campaign and the iApps. The Mac just works for ordinary folks. With that said, Fink is not necessarily for ordinary folks. Its target audience is admittedly more narrow. Plus Fink and Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings is all about esoteric commands. But I don't think that is an excuse to forgo good documentation and sound software development and deployment. I'm a graphic designer by trade. Oftentimes when I am working on a project, I assume that the audience--the end user--will understand something because it's so obvious. But to be a good designer is to step back and really think about the audience and realize that maybe they WON'T understand something because indeed, I as the designer was too close to it. I think this same principle applies in the case of software design (and not mention other aspects of everyday life, like programming a universal remote). Sorry for the long-winded response. Again, I think it's safe to say that the entire Mac community is grateful for all the work the developers of Fink have done so far. We all just want to see you succeed. Thanks. ---Roger ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility Learn to use your power at OSDN's High Performance Computing Channel http://hpc.devchannel.org/ _______________________________________________ Fink-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-users
