Hi, everyone in general --
Without going too far into the whole argument of what's intuitive or not
and without condemning too much, I hope, those users who get in our way
and keep us from doing what we should be able to do (read mail and surf
and occasionally fix systems :-) I would say that this *is* becoming a
FAQ and it's because folks aren't reading the docs.
It seems that mutt is cresting one of those points of explosive growth
where we see a massive influx of clueless newbies -- perhaps, due to
the easy availability of Linux and even other more mainstream *NIX
distributions, so new that they don't even know how things work in The
Right World (tm) -- and have to deal with a bunch of questions that seem
pretty darned dumb even when we look back to the days when we were young
and lusers ourselves.
Unfortunately, this translates directly into more traffic on the mailing
lists that is of fairly low interest to at least the Original Ones; after
all, who wants to keep telling people why mutt doesn't talk on port 25 or
how to configure pgp or why color works with vim but not mutt or even how
to group reply. Note that I'm guilty, in recent times, of some of these
questions myself; I'd like to think that I've done my homework and found
the documentation confusing or lacking, but it's more probable that I
just didn't do my homework, either. The problem, though, is that some of
the Original Ones are getting tired of this crap and are unsubscribing or
strongly contemplating it. I can hardly blame them; I saw the same
decline on the sun-managers list a couple of years ago, and went that
route myself.
It seems to me, though I certainly speak not from any position of
authority, that we as the mutt community need to come up with some Quick
Start and "mutt for the impatient" docs, perhaps along the lines of the
proposed "mutt for Attorneys" item mentioned recently, to head off some
of the questions but also to come up with some more proactive methods
of getting this information out. Without going into a drawn-out call
for votes or anything silly like that, what does anyone think about
- asking, most very humbly, the doc writers to spend some time on the
FAQ or Quick Start, even at the expense of the full documentation,
just to round it out and provide something to throw at requesters
- somehow more strongly expecting those who post questions to post
summaries (even if it's a summary of lack of response)
- better promoting the searchable archives and perhaps redesigning the
main mutt page to first send folks to answers
- a mail server (my favorite idea :-) to which folks can forward such
requests that spits out a form letter to the requester pointing him
to the proper places to search (archives, FAQ, manual) and the manual
section where the option(s) is(are) defined
for starters? Heck, maybe the Muttrc included in RPMs could pop up a
message saying "Don't ask; read first" until the user figures out how to
get rid of it, and the Makefile in the tarball could require that one
read a similar message before the compile will proceed...
I suppose I should stop this before I kill again... HAND
:-D
--
David T-G * It's easier to fight for one's principles
(play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * than to live up to them. -- fortune cookie
(work) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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The "new millennium" starts at the beginning of 2001. There was no year 0.
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