Hi Thorsten,
thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote:
> Let me now speak more to the audience at large, rather than to Martin
> personally... In both statements I read the following ideas (I don't know
> if you literally meant that - but that's what came across)
>
> * while the mailinglist is for real work, the forum is just for playing
> around
>
> * consequently, while the forum can be impressed by cheap tricks and eye
> candy, the 'real' development community cares about more important things
> such as accuracy
This is a rather incomplete and therefore, at least to my opinion,
pretty unfortunate and unsuitable representation of a certain status
quo.
See, the mailing list is having a tradition of more then a decade for
inter-developer-communication. It has not only survived my own
familiarization with the FlightGear project but also quite a few other
unfortunate side issues. List members - those who are often being
pejoratively called "the developers" (mostly) by those who are not
subscribed - have arranged themselves quite nicely with the list and,
like myself, have established methods or tools which allow to gather
much information in very little time.
The FlightGear Web Forum is a completely different beast. I have to
admit that I know just this single web forum from own experience, so my
general understanding of web forums is quite limited. Anyway, here I'm
referring to "our" forum only.
To put it shortly: I've never ever seen any technically assisted
communication channel where the cost-benefit ratio is as bad as on this
forum - this isn't even surpassed by badly configured VoIP telephony
systems ....
So, where do you guess are you going to meet those who are primarily
interested in efficient communication !? As a consequence, you'd
rather likely meet a bigger fraction of those species on the forum who
are driven by different intentions. It's easy as that.
> Let me take a virtual needle and deflate the claims a bit. Until recently,
> Flightgear's idea of a weather change was that pressure, wind and
> visibility instantly jump from one value to another. Hardly what I would
> call accuracy. [...]
Sure, FlightGear is rather incomplete (the extent is always depending
on the point of view). Every feature requires someone to implement it,
every bug requires someone to fix it. Alleging that "the developers"
don't understand the implications or don't care about them is pretty
inappropriate.
To pick your example up, I typically don't try to land a C172 on water,
neither in FlightGear nor in real life. This doesn't imply that I'm
accepting this bug/feature as "good enough". In fact I _do_ feel
annoyed that aircraft developers are forced to implement ugly hacks for
seaplanes because the FDM doesn't properly handle this case (not sure
if one of the FDM's is already having a consistent implementation of
gear forces). On the other hand there are other topics which I'm
concerned about much _more_ (aside from the substantial fact that FDM
is not my domain). So do others. In consequence, the bug or feature
remains unfixed until someone takes a stab at it.
> I could go on, but I think my point is clear - the Flightgear development
> community doesn't value accuracy as such, but each of you has some notion
> of where he would like to have more accuracy, [...]
The entire debate about "accuracy" is moot as long as people not only
take different measures but also refer to different definitions of
accuracy.
> [...] So instead of alienating people who care about
> modelling, texturing, reflection shaders for exterior models and such
> things by referring to all that as 'fun for the forum', I think you'd be
> much better off by encouraging these people to improve the aspects they
> are interested in and kindly teaching them to value also the aspects which
> are important to you personally.
>
> Frankly, the elitist attitude expressed in such sentences bothers me. I
> feel much more welcome in the forum - and as a result I usually write much
> more of my observations, progress reports and ideas in the forum. I also
> usually get as good response as I get here. So if you only read the list,
> there's lots of info which you're missing.
Been there, spent many, many hours on explaining the background behind
the Scenemodels/MapServer efforts .... and finally left the forum
after I realized that the "not invented here" attitude dramatically
outperforms the idea of collaborating on a common goal (plus a couple
of other reasons).
> So, now what happens - a few folks get involved, follow the elaborate and
> nicely illustrate recipe how to do things and actually produce scenery -
> to hear that what they do is just 'craving for aaah's and oooh's on The
> Forum', as opposed to 'the real thing'. Well - just how charming and
> encouraging is that?
Being honest: I don't care. If people think that following a cooking
recipe is their cup of tea, then I'm fine with it. If they call this
"Scenery development" and behave like having reinvented the wheel, then
they're invited to reflect my comment.
Cheers,
Martin.
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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