Eddy Young wrote:
It is unfortunate that your first post on the mailing list is to announce a blog entry ranting about your irks with RIFE. Most of us use the mailing list as a second source of documentation when the Wiki does not provide the answer.
It wasn't my first post on the list, but I will grant you that I am not a longtime participant -- which is kind of the point. The message in question was the perspective of someone who hasn't had a lot of experience with RIFE yet, which means someone who hasn't spent lots of time asking questions on the mailing list. By the time you've gotten all your questions answered on the list, you no longer have the perspective of a new user.
The fact that at least one person wrote to agree with what I said tells me that it wasn't a completely unjustified rant. I have to believe there are at least a few others who just gave up and moved on to a different framework after running into what I described; you will never hear from those people since they will never bother to join the mailing list and won't consider it worth the time to write up their experiences.
Actually, I *know* such people exist, because I was one of them until recently; I read through the user guide last year and was puzzled that it didn't even hint at all the "don't repeat yourself" constraint stuff I'd heard RIFE had. I saw some of that mentioned in the cookbook, but it didn't look like the description was all that complete (and it seemed to be kind of scattered around in bits and pieces in different parts of the documentation, as Stefan alluded to). I quickly realized I was going to have to really hunt around and do a lot of reading of the source to figure out how to use the framework. So I put RIFE on my "come back and look at this later" list rather than my "learn this right now" list.
If all the mailing list ever hears is reports from long-time users about how wonderful everything is and specific questions that aren't covered in the documentation, there will be no way to know what the overall experience is like for a new user. I wrote what I wrote not because I want to upset people or bash RIFE, but because I actually *like* RIFE and I want it to be successful. If I didn't care about it at all, I wouldn't have bothered. Was I frustrated at the time, and therefore not as diplomatic as I might have been? Yeah, probably. But the fact remains that there is value in an outsider's evaluation of RIFE's strengths (very clean and internally consistent conceptual model, fabulous template system, and helpful user community, to name three) and its shortcomings.
Once again, though, I apologize if I've offended anyone. That is not the intent at all.
-Steve _______________________________________________ Rife-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
