hi

> See right there.  Thats what gets me about open-source projects.
>  Developers play god, are accountable to no one, have outdated faq's

ok, supposed that you are right. but let me ask you the question the
other way round: have you ever tried to get help from microsoft or some
other really big global player? ever tried to get help from icq e.g.?
netscape? see what i mean?

if you find standardized automatically generated emails COOL, then
please go download an evaluation version of something. there is nothing
wrong about it. in contrary, it is pretty obvious that the world
couldn't work the same way round if there were only unpaid free projects
all over it :-)

you are funny though. you ask a question, you get an answer within 12h
(show me a commercial hotline which can beat it and we'll discuss the
prices later) and you begin to argue about the lack of documentation.
have you ever seen any documentation on netscape, windows or ms office?

your documentation is pretty much the available open source itself. now
it's clear that with  time passing by it becomes a pretty huge docu, so
what we need is a documentation for the documentation and so on. the
developers can only provide fast pointers. now, the latter are
completely incomprehesible and sometimes the guys really tend to
misunderstand what a rookie wants to know. but still, you get your
bloody response and not an automated "thank you for your request, we are
lucky to help you. please follow the steps in this mail: 1. reboot
windows. 2. reinstall icq. 3. if the problem persists write another
email to our support". no really, thank you, icq :-)

don't blame developers for the lack of documentation. it is called an
"open-source-project". that is:

a) it is NOT a product, meaning you don't have ANY garanties and can't
claim anything. but you already know that.
b) you are free to contribute, that is also what open stands for. that's
also something you know but perhaps don't want to do. it's accepted
though.


> source projects ARE cool.  However it just gets me at how
> non-user-friendly they can become when it comes to documentation/help.

the problem is that from your point of view you are the first person to
ask about this particular problem :-)


> Yes - perhaps if I was a tad bit swifter or a developer I would be
> asking these mudane questions, but I'm not.  The only thing I have to go
> on un/under maintained faq.

do maintain it. provide input. let it be, if you don't want. you still
have it, at least.

the good point about the open source software is: you always know why it
is doing something or not doing something. practically, you have a
little contradiction here: the more the software is capable of, the more
it gets complicated, the more the failures are difficult to track and
the more the options are various and thus difficult to explain. but
that's not a particular problem of open source.

now calm down, try to figure out what you wanted to do, understand what
alan says and then repost your question in a different way if you feel
that the answer wasn't enough. there are more people on the list, not
only alan - who provides the most replies but is quite rude from time to
time :-)


greetings
artur

-- 
Artur Hecker
artur[at]hecker.info

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