[ic] The Interchange-Users Owners' Club

[Jason Kohles]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 08:19:09AM -0800, tburt@timburt.com wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 
Perhaps it does, and things to get added to the documentation frequently,
but many of the frequent questions are already answered in the documentation.

> 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.
> 
And when people do the same thing for Interchange, that information gets
incorporated as well.  In fact the developer website has an 'Add note' button
at the bottom of every page that lets you add your comments without the
help of the developers, which also emails your note to the documentation
maintainers who consider whether to add it to the documentation (generally
they do), however very few people (on the order of maybe 2 a month) actually
take advantage of this.

> 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 don't have the documentation memorized, so obviously I don't think that's
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.
> 
As have many other people.  How will you feel however, when after posting this
well thought out summary, you are attacked because you refuse to post it
twice a week when the question gets repeated?

> 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.  

I don't want to seem overly harsh, but this is complete crap.  If this were
the case then Red Hat would be fairly upset over the number of questions
that I've answered for free in this forum, rather than encouraging their
developers to participate here.

> 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.  
> 
Nobody is interested in keeping it hard to use.  If there are problems with
the rpm's they probably stem from the fact that 4.8 is the first release to
be distributed as rpm's.  If you find problems please file them as bugs so
they can be fixed.

> 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.  

And when the problem is with the documentation, it does usually get fixed.
In fact, even though I'm not currently assigned to the Interchange team and
am working in the middle of nowhere on a client site in Illinois, I have spent
a great deal of my free time working on detailed content for the encryption
sections of the faq.  My effort to document the common problems with setting
up pgp has been stymied however, by the fact that nearly everyone who has
trouble with it posts 'it doesn't work' with no detail, which doesn't give
me much to work with from the mailing list archives.

-- 
Jason Kohles                                 jkohles@redhat.com
Senior System Architect                      (703)786-8036 (cellular)
Red Hat Professional Consulting              (703)456-2940 (office)