From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Mar 14 09:05:40 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id JAA03329 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Sat, 14 Mar 1998 09:05:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from uniqsite.uniqsite.com. (uniqsite.com [206.14.149.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA03318 for ; Sat, 14 Mar 1998 09:05:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from timm@uniqsite.com) Received: from localhost (timm@localhost) by uniqsite.uniqsite.com. (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id JAA04530; Sat, 14 Mar 1998 09:05:23 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from timm@uniqsite.com) Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1998 09:05:23 -0800 (PST) From: Tim Moony To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Help! Upgrade 2.2.5-RELEASE to 2.2-STABLE. In-Reply-To: <8029.889873747@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, 14 Mar 1998, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > Well, that's what the archives are for. Yes, I rely solely on the mailing list for a lot of problems I have. > This has already happened irretrievably in many of Linux's formerly > effective support media (like IRC's #linux channel and quite a few of > their newsgroups) and the writing is on the wall for any OS group with > a growing user population. > > The only known counter to this scenario is to somehow (and no, I don't > know how we'd do it) get the new users trained early to be good with > the search engines, the sources and what web based documentation there > is in answering any questions which can be answered that way. Despite > what one might think after observing the poor state of our docs (and > you'll not hear anyone yelling louder about that than I), my long > history of observing "newbies in the wild" has revealed that the great > majority of problems comes from a simple _unwillingness to read the I agree. Poor docs and poorly trained newbies. > docs_. Newbies *don't want* to read the docs. Reading docs is > boring! They'd much much rather go to someone in IRC or email and say > "tell me what to do, dammit, I don't want to read no stinking docs!" > and that's what eventually kills those media - they don't scale at > high loads. > > Unfortunately, those media are currently about all we've got and so > we're still faced with the short-term problem of too few people to > answer questions, too little documentation and a whole boatload of > newbies going "HELP!" in the mailing lists. Any suggestions as to how > we might encourage the formation of more self-help movements in our > user base would be welcomed before this problem starts becoming > significantly more acute. I'd suggest a how-to section in the WWW pages with pointers to "good?" docs that are already out there. I have to admit sometimes I go to Linux' SunSite for answers. I believe a lot of guys are doing the same. Tim To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message