Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 09:37:35 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au> To: "Sue Blake" <sue@welearn.com.au>, "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: "Kathy Quinlan" <katinka@magestower.com>, "N6REJ" <n6rej@tcsn.net>, <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: I'm leaving Message-ID: <024b01c0dc05$b1314fc0$0300a8c0@oracle> References: <002b01c0db54$e0febaa0$5599ca3f@disappointment> <20010513171444.E26123@welearn.com.au> <00f401c0db7e$ff3ca2a0$fe00a8c0@kat.lan> <20010513122623.I97034@lpt.ens.fr> <20010514084709.A68348@welearn.com.au>
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> And that is exactly the problem faced by many newbies: not knowing > where to look, nor realising they're there when they've found it. They > can't tell because there are concepts that they don't have, and when > they look at the documentation they might find vaguely familiar words > which are not used in every day speech and which have a particular > meaning to people with a formal computer education. > :) ..... its called "martian" .... or maybe I'm confused & its really "venusian" !!! As I said in another posting, when I need to do something I generally wish to do it in the immediate future, not after I've had time to go spend a small fortune on O'Reilly books (for the benefit of the yankees they cost a days wage for many people in OZ with the current exchang rate of the pacific peso), then learn to comprehend martian / venusian at an academic level, and finally read half a library so one understands the historical background / philosophy / etc ........ when all that was needed in the first place was "run blah -x | grep foo" Its stuff like this that could readily be explained to the level needed for said newbie to achieve whatever they wish to achieve without all the drama. OK so the developers are busy people (& thats not in dispute), so how do we go about getting "official" sanction of the "user friendly" sites that do attempt to fill a need that the official docs can't / won't ?? > The man pages do this a lot. For example, in ls(1) we have a few words > that probably won't be understood without unix knowledge, and I have > no problem with that. Words like "FIFO", "symbolic link", etc > need to be looked up in a unix text somewhere and learned. Until > then, you are not so likely to need the relatively more advanced stuff > that they are found in. Part of the deal is learning about these things. > There is a limit to how much martian / venusian most of us can absorb in a hurry. For many people its very limited, so since the official folk didn't learn to speak the same language the majority of regular folk do it appears that meaningful docs can only be written by a team comprising someone with a reasonable grasp of english (or whatever language), an expert or two in a consultancy role, plus an interpreter who may not be an expert developer but speaks both the developer language & english (or whatever) > > With these, once you've seen them in a unix context they're obvious, > but they don't have instant meaning that leaps out for a beginner. > So why the commandment "Thou shalt never use visual representations" (aka screenshots) ?? Hey maybe the docs folk are all visually impaired & use one of those screenreader apps like "Jaws". Might explain why all "official" docs muddle through with largely unintelligible text rather than the 'picture tells a thousand words" approach > Some man pages restate these in more common words or show very > easy examples where their meanings are apparent. Our man pages > for the common user and setup commands could be improved by a > going-over with this perspective in mind, perhaps referring to > others such as the Tru64 man pages for ideas. In other documents, > such as the Handbook, we could use something like a newbie review > team to make sure that unnecessary difficulties don't creep > in or they are linked to explanations or a glossary. > Exactly .... maybe then we'd have official docs with words on the pages rather than simply chapter headings & virtually blank pages !!! > > even when it's > > demonstrated to them that you can easily do with FreeBSD just about > > anything you can do with Linux. > I couldn't imagine in my worst nightmare using linux for anything .... FreeBSD does most of what I want quite efficiently. The problem is simply how to figure new stuff out without making it into a command performance. Where I started with this thread was trying to discover if its reasonably feasable to write a step_by_step HOWTO about X-windows. After about a thousand postings I'm still none the wiser .... the only halfway relevant feedback advised that all open source GUIs are broken abortions / a waste of time / against the religion. (all of which I'd decided years ago). So what about all those people posting questions like "how do I configure my you beaut 256Mb , watercooled, turbocharged blah videocard for X-windows" ...... seems even many of us who have been using FreeBSD for years still haven't much idea how to configure an S3 Virge to work properly. > > Exactly what are we expecting newcomers to know, and > why can't we state those expectations clearly? > Thats a very good question & I'll be very interested to see the responses :) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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