Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 23:51:18 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: Doug Barton <Doug@gorean.org>, David Murphy <drjolt@redbrick.dcu.ie>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: make world failed Message-ID: <v04220834b5100f2bcb7c@[195.238.1.121]> In-Reply-To: <18940.954883378@zippy.cdrom.com> References: <18940.954883378@zippy.cdrom.com>
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At 2:22 PM -0700 2000/4/4, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > I really am tired of people telling us what reality should be rather > than making that reality come about through their own efforts. The single biggest problem in any large volunteer effort is determining where your skills can be of help. Until you can figure that out, the project looks like one of the worlds largest mountains, and you can't begin to comprehend how it could possibly be climbed by anyone, much less completely flattened and reduced to plains. However, once you do figure that out, it starts to look more like some pebbles piled on top of some boulders, set in some upthrust bedrock that is covered with dirt -- and it starts becoming a more manageable problem to have you take out your shovel and start digging somewhere, or take out your sledgehammer and start pounding some rocks into smaller rocks. Of course, it also helps to have some time to devote to projects like this, but even if you've got time, if you get too many hostile responses then the likelihood is that you will be considerably less likely to devote your time to that project. It's one thing to want only constructive criticism, it's another to facilitate it. As David Murphy <drjolt@redbrick.dcu.ie> said before, FreeBSD is very welcoming to developers who run across a problem, fix it, and then send in the patches. It tends to be less welcoming to people who just want to use it, and don't have the talent, skills, knowledge, time, or inclination to try to fix the problems that they run across. You have to decide whether FreeBSD is going to be a developers-only OS, or if it is going to become more user-friendly. If the goal is the latter, then the quality of the documentation has to improve -- and not everyone who complains about the documentation will be able to help fix it. This is a simple fact that will just have to be accepted. Better yet would be for POLA to be violated with less frequency and fewer potential destructive consequences, so that you don't need to improve the documentation -- the system just works, and there's no need to document something that "just works". In other words, less is more. ;-) -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, <blk@skynet.be> || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124 Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels http://www.skynet.be || Belgium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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