[ic] The Interchange-Users Owners' Club

Mon Dec 17 11:22:05 2001

You make an excellent point Jason.  And a brief one too!  Thx.

However, it appears to me that if the same question is being asked over 
and over, then perhaps that is an indication that something needs to be 
fixed?  Or better documented?

For example, a few months ago, the Trinux mailing list was inundated with 
"I can't get ssh to work", "what am I doing wrong?" questions.  I 
answered it a few times, mostly explaining that Trinux was a poor 
environment in which to learn the tricks to SSH.  The Trinux 
implementation was non-standard, and Matt had recently hacked it to meet 
his needs, and broken part of it.  That's the privilege of being the 
developer...

Rather than scream at the users to RTFM, I offered to rewrite the
installation and startup script.  Matt promptly incorporated my rewrite
into the distribution and you know what?  I haven't seen a single post
since then.

I am a little dismayed by the number of little problems I am facing to get 
this application up and running.  I can find them and fix them, but I 
would rather not.  I could memorize the docs, but should that really be 
necessary?

I am willing to ask intellegent questions, after doing a reasonable amount
of research and in return, I try to post coherent summaries that describe
what I have learned, and the mistakes I made, in hopes that someone else
can learn from my mistakes, and save some time in doing so.

I can understand RedHat's position.  They want you to become so frustrated 
that you go to their website and plunk down $3000 to get a working system.  
RedHat has a vested interest in keeping this application hard to install 
and hard to work with.  Normally, a RedHat rpm does the right thing, the 
first time, and people like me, with work to do, can get back to business.  
I really appreciate this, and because of this, I use RedHat, and I buy the 
releases.  (I support software that works!)  I was expecting somewhat the 
same from Interchange, but the rpm's failed to give me a working system.  

Thank you Jason, for participating on this list!  I can see that you are 
genuinely helpful and really want to do what is right.  But again, the 
recurring questions are an indication that something needs to be fixed.  
That is all.

And a big Thank you to RedHat for adopting InterChange.  I hope that Mike 
and the other developers (minivend?) got fair compensation for his 
efforts.

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Jason Kohles wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 09:28:10AM -0500, AddAction New Media wrote:
> > It is a pity that some people on this list that know a lot about Interchange
> > only like to answer the "interesting" questions and not those that are
> > simple (at least for them). Doing a search does not always bring the right
> > answer, even if it has been asked and answered many times, because it might
> > be in bits and pieces. And then someone with a simple question might get
> > frustrated that nobody answers that question.
> > 
> After you've answered the same question a few dozen times, you start to think
> that maybe people should check the archives first.  Call me crazy, but what is
> the incentive for someone who knows the answer to spend 10 minutes typing it
> up if the person asking the question isn't even willing to spend that long
> typing a few words into the search box on the developer website?
> 
> 

-- 
--------------------
Timothy Burt
Internet Specialist