I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
I work for a living. I have no idea what most of the other people on this list do, but I often feel in a minority. This list should have a narrow focus, restricted to using Fedora, and that's it. But instead we have all manner of ridiculous threads, not all of them flame wars, that go on and on and on. For the last couple of months I actually suspended delivery from this list because I just couldn't cope with the volume. Even as it is, I skim through messages, quite possibly missing things that i could either learn from or help others with just because there is too much traffic. Who's at fault? Well there is no one else to blame but ourselves. We *are* the list. Either we decide to only respond to genuine questions and issues, and ignore the trolls and flame-bait, or we give into our urges and wreck this community completely. Given the traffic the last couple of days I have myself considered unsubscribing. Which is a shame, as whilst that flame war was going on I was helping someone who was a complete newbie actually install Fedora. Shame on everyone who perpetuated that total waste of time with so little consideration for the silent majority on this list.
All of you can say, "If you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen", but if the temperature gets any hotter so many people might leave that the Fedora community might end up as one long slanging match like the Debian community is. I assume that that is not what we want.
So could all of us think twice about what to reply to? If someone says something stupid, or slags us off, or asks a question they could clearly answer for themselves if they just tried, how about just ignoring them? How about all of us exercising a little restraint?
Best, Darren
D. D. Brierton wrote on 28/01/2005 09:02:
I work for a living. I have no idea what most of the other people on this list do, but I often feel in a minority. This list should have a narrow focus, restricted to using Fedora, and that's it. But instead we have all manner of ridiculous threads, not all of them flame wars, that go on and on and on. For the last couple of months I actually suspended delivery from this list because I just couldn't cope with the volume. Even as it is, I skim through messages, quite possibly missing things that i could either learn from or help others with just because there is too much traffic. Who's at fault? Well there is no one else to blame but ourselves. We *are* the list. Either we decide to only respond to genuine questions and issues, and ignore the trolls and flame-bait, or we give into our urges and wreck this community completely. Given the traffic the last couple of days I have myself considered unsubscribing. Which is a shame, as whilst that flame war was going on I was helping someone who was a complete newbie actually install Fedora. Shame on everyone who perpetuated that total waste of time with so little consideration for the silent majority on this list.
I totally agree. I like to help out where I can but in the morning when I get on, there's usually over 200 messages. Most of the time I just delete the messages because the real requests for help get lost in the mix. As you say it also restricts our ability to learn and also improve the product.
I certainly ignore the obviously trolling and annoying advocacy type stuff (where there's another group for). I wish everyone would do the same!
Rob
D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
I work for a living. I have no idea what most of the other people on this list do, but I often feel in a minority. This list should have a narrow focus, restricted to using Fedora, and that's it. But instead we have all manner of ridiculous threads, not all of them flame wars, that go on and on and on. For the last couple of months I actually suspended delivery from this list because I just couldn't cope with the volume. Even as it is, I skim through messages, quite possibly missing things that i could either learn from or help others with just because there is too much traffic. Who's at fault? Well there is no one else to blame but ourselves. We *are* the list. Either we decide to only respond to genuine questions and issues, and ignore the trolls and flame-bait, or we give into our urges and wreck this community completely. Given the traffic the last couple of days I have myself considered unsubscribing. Which is a shame, as whilst that flame war was going on I was helping someone who was a complete newbie actually install Fedora. Shame on everyone who perpetuated that total waste of time with so little consideration for the silent majority on this list.
All of you can say, "If you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen", but if the temperature gets any hotter so many people might leave that the Fedora community might end up as one long slanging match like the Debian community is. I assume that that is not what we want.
So could all of us think twice about what to reply to? If someone says something stupid, or slags us off, or asks a question they could clearly answer for themselves if they just tried, how about just ignoring them? How about all of us exercising a little restraint?
Best, Darren
I must confess your post puzzles me... On the one hand you say it very clearly... But I wonder what is the purpose of lists such as this? Yes, there has been some bitter events in the past couple of days, but I think we can always overcome this. I agree with you that there's a lot of traffic on this list... As they say, it all depends on how do you look at it: for some people the high amount of traffic may indicate an active and healthy community, where as the lack there off means the opposite, what does it mean to you?. Don't get me wrong, I also find it difficult to keep up with the pace... And in cases like this, it may be better if there was some kind of official message board forum for the community given the amount of traffic (I just subscribed a few days ago, and already have (a dedicated sub-directory of my e-mail account just for this list) 1812 messages on it!! that is quite a bit!!). On the other hand I don't quite grasp what you mean... I don't think comparing the Fedora community to the Debian community is fair for either one... Yes many of us (including myself) have our own opinions about the Debian community, and sadly more often than not those opinions are not very optimistic, but to each their own!
I don't know how true is it to say that this list is meeting point of two aspects completely different from one another: The technological aspect, the distribution itself, Fedora, a software product which all that come and post to this mailing list use... But there is also one factor that is not as easily understood, let alone regulate accurately: the human aspect of it. One of the things Linux and in general Open Source communities have is that there is some kind of aura surrounding them... I'd rather use another word to describe it, but I can't find it (my vocabulary is so limited!), but it some times seems like some sort of "religious fanatism"... The only reason I find for this "phenomenon" to onset is that the community as a whole (and I mean de different communities who have as a common aspect Linux to them) "believe" in the Open Source, that it works and can change the way the world thinks today into a more open scenario... And even though I think that this can actually happen, I must confess that I'm impress how personal some individuals take this... And it is not one or two... are many more... much more. So in a mailing list like this, these two aspects, this "duality" colides... which is (at least to me) an interesting thing to watch.
In any case... I for one appreciate your concern about the community and what it might be happening to it... I can only sit tight and watch as the events unravel while we wait on the next Core release and pray for someone to answer to our posts.
On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 09:02, D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
I work for a living. I have no idea what most of the other people on this list do, but I often feel in a minority. This list should have a narrow focus, restricted to using Fedora, and that's it. But instead we have all manner of ridiculous threads, not all of them flame wars, that go on and on and on. For the last couple of months I actually suspended delivery from this list because I just couldn't cope with the volume. Even as it is, I skim through messages, quite possibly missing things that i could either learn from or help others with just because there is too much traffic. Who's at fault? Well there is no one else to blame but ourselves. We *are* the list. Either we decide to only respond to genuine questions and issues, and ignore the trolls and flame-bait, or we give into our urges and wreck this community completely. Given the traffic the last couple of days I have myself considered unsubscribing. Which is a shame, as whilst that flame war was going on I was helping someone who was a complete newbie actually install Fedora. Shame on everyone who perpetuated that total waste of time with so little consideration for the silent majority on this list.
All of you can say, "If you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen", but if the temperature gets any hotter so many people might leave that the Fedora community might end up as one long slanging match like the Debian community is. I assume that that is not what we want.
So could all of us think twice about what to reply to? If someone says something stupid, or slags us off, or asks a question they could clearly answer for themselves if they just tried, how about just ignoring them? How about all of us exercising a little restraint?
Best, Darren
--
D. D. Brierton darren@dzr-web.com www.dzr-web.com Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson) =====================================================================
Hi,
Well said, that about sums it up for me too.
On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 03:52 -0600, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I must confess your post puzzles me... On the one hand you say it very clearly... But I wonder what is the purpose of lists such as this?
I hope you won't mind if I don't reply in detail to your thoughtful and well-written reply. I don't want this to turn into a thread which exemplifies all the things I was decrying in my original posting. But I agree with much of what you say: yes, the passions and the volume with which they are expressed on this list is a sign of the health and vigour of the Fedora community; but at the same time it is also a danger for it. Many voices shouting loudly about nothing terribly important is not productive. Remember that at this moment, with CVS (or is it SVN now?) access still not opened up, these mailing lists are pretty much what constitutes the Fedora community. And if these flame wars continue then I think that community might dissipate horribly -- after all, how many Red Hat engineers post here nowadays? I think that there is a danger that people will leave this mailing list for good if it continues like it is, and that will be a bad thing for everyone. That was the only point I was trying to make.
Best, Darren
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:23:09 +0000 "D. D. Brierton" darren@dzr-web.com wrote
[...] Remember that at this moment, with CVS (or is it SVN now?) access still not opened up, [...]
No CVS access right now?
That would explain my problems and tell me which way to turn. (Ergo, try this on Mac OS X instead, since I know where the source is for that.)
-- Joel Rees rees@ddcom.co.jp digitcom, inc. 株式会社デジコム Kobe, Japan +81-78-672-8800 ** http://www.ddcom.co.jp **
D. D. Brierton wrote:
I hope you won't mind if I don't reply in detail to your thoughtful and well-written reply. I don't want this to turn into a thread which exemplifies all the things I was decrying in my original posting. But I agree with much of what you say: yes, the passions and the volume with which they are expressed on this list is a sign of the health and vigour of the Fedora community; but at the same time it is also a danger for it. Many voices shouting loudly about nothing terribly important is not productive. Remember that at this moment, with CVS (or is it SVN now?) access still not opened up, these mailing lists are pretty much what constitutes the Fedora community. And if these flame wars continue then I think that community might dissipate horribly -- after all, how many Red Hat engineers post here nowadays? I think that there is a danger that people will leave this mailing list for good if it continues like it is, and that will be a bad thing for everyone. That was the only point I was trying to make.
Best, Darren
Point well taken... A word of caution never hurts... And I see your point about the absense of Red Hat personnel on the list, however I also think that the whole point of Fedora was to be taken care by the community it could generate... Red Hat is still a great part of the distro and the communtiy and I don't think that will ever change (and I certainly hope it won't!!), but this also allows us, the users to experiment and take care of this huge baby the whole Fedora project is, either by supplyin users in trouble with support and answers to their inquiries even if they're the most basic ones... I myself try as hard as I can to avoid giving a freaking RTFM answer... Why? Because I know what does it feel like to be struck by such an answer as a newbie... However I try to also encourage study and investigation upon answering (I cannot always attain this, but I try)... And many more do their best too...
The dynamic nature of the list is what is making it quite hard to keep up with, a less dynamic means of communication (such as official community forums) are, in my opinon more suited to the amount of volume this list gets... being less dynamic means less overflow, you can go through threads at much more slow pace and it will even be a better way to encourage growth, or so I see it.
Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
The dynamic nature of the list is what is making it quite hard to keep up with, a less dynamic means of communication (such as official community forums) are, in my opinon more suited to the amount of volume this list gets... being less dynamic means less overflow, you can go through threads at much more slow pace and it will even be a better way to encourage growth, or so I see it.
This mailing list is already available in forum format at: http://fcp.homelinux.org/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=10
I much prefer mailing lists to forums personally, and if this list was to become forum-only, I wouldn't be here. It's just too much hassle to trawl through forums IMHO.
Paul.
getting this error..... while installing pkgs thru yum.
Error: Requiring package webppliance-mysql-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb Error: Requiring package webppliance-tomcat4-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb Error: Requiring package webppliance-mivamerchant-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb
any or some help welcome
Paul Howarth wrote:
This mailing list is already available in forum format at: http://fcp.homelinux.org/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=10
I much prefer mailing lists to forums personally, and if this list was to become forum-only, I wouldn't be here. It's just too much hassle to trawl through forums IMHO.
Paul.
While I also prefer mailing list, I cannot deny the usefulness of web forums, especially when there's lots of traffic like in this list, which can lead to inbox or mail-box (as a whole) flooding... Even though in a mailing list you also choose what to read and to pass, just as in a forum, you also are left to clean your mail-box, which is not needed in the web-forum... For not-so-populated mailing lists like the ALSA-users one, I'd rather use my e-mail client... though for a list with the amount of traffic this one has... I'd rather use the web interface.
Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
Paul Howarth wrote:
This mailing list is already available in forum format at: http://fcp.homelinux.org/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=10
I much prefer mailing lists to forums personally, and if this list was to become forum-only, I wouldn't be here. It's just too much hassle to trawl through forums IMHO.
Paul.
While I also prefer mailing list, I cannot deny the usefulness of web forums, especially when there's lots of traffic like in this list, which can lead to inbox or mail-box (as a whole) flooding... Even though in a mailing list you also choose what to read and to pass, just as in a forum, you also are left to clean your mail-box, which is not needed in the web-forum... For not-so-populated mailing lists like the ALSA-users one, I'd rather use my e-mail client... though for a list with the amount of traffic this one has... I'd rather use the web interface.
I can certainly understand why many people would prefer to access this list as a forum, but I'm not one of them. Having the option of both, as at present, is the best way I think.
Paul.
crisppy fernandes wrote:
getting this error..... while installing pkgs thru yum.
Error: Requiring package webppliance-mysql-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb Error: Requiring package webppliance-tomcat4-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb Error: Requiring package webppliance-mivamerchant-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb
any or some help welcome
Just a suggestion, to avoid "forking", it'd be best if you created a new e-mail/thread to the list so your issue may be better exposed and will be even looked at by those who could probably help you...
Now regarding the problem, seems like you don't have that package installed, and for some reason yum is not able to solve the dependency it has... What is the command you are using to install it?
crisppy fernandes wrote:
getting this error..... while installing pkgs thru yum.
Error: Requiring package webppliance-mysql-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb Error: Requiring package webppliance-tomcat4-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb Error: Requiring package webppliance-mivamerchant-epilog-4.0.3-0119.fc not in transaction set nor in rpmdb
any or some help welcome
Please do not hijack threads like this. Instead of using "Reply-To", compose a new mail to fedora-list@redhat.com. And use an appropriate "Subject" too. That way, more people are likely to notice your post and reply to it.
As for your problem, you'll need to provide more information. What is it that you are trying to install, and which repository do you expect it to be installed from? What do you have in your /etc/yum.conf?
Please start a new thread with the answers to these questions rather than replying to this message.
Paul.
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
A good email-client may help you cope with the volume. Threading is a must.
The fedora mailinglist has become a general forum for all things Fedora (except development and testing related items, which have their own mailinglists). It makes sense that most of the developers are on fedora-test and fedora-devel, rather than on this list.
It is a normal evolution with any project to move from a single to many mailinglists. It is not a threat, it makes things more viable.
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]
Paul Howarth wrote:
Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
Paul Howarth wrote:
This mailing list is already available in forum format at: http://fcp.homelinux.org/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=10
I much prefer mailing lists to forums personally, and if this list was to become forum-only, I wouldn't be here. It's just too much hassle to trawl through forums IMHO.
Paul.
While I also prefer mailing list, I cannot deny the usefulness of web forums, especially when there's lots of traffic like in this list, which can lead to inbox or mail-box (as a whole) flooding... Even though in a mailing list you also choose what to read and to pass, just as in a forum, you also are left to clean your mail-box, which is not needed in the web-forum... For not-so-populated mailing lists like the ALSA-users one, I'd rather use my e-mail client... though for a list with the amount of traffic this one has... I'd rather use the web interface.
I can certainly understand why many people would prefer to access this list as a forum, but I'm not one of them. Having the option of both, as at present, is the best way I think.
There is another option that no-one has mentioned yet, and that is to view the mailing list as a 'news' list through the gmane servers. I'm currently reading through this thread, and replying through 'KNode', so its obviously working. :)
Just my 2p's worth Sharon.
On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 09:02 +0000, D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high.
Well, learn to read lists like these selectively ;-)
That's probably how most "regulars" are reading such lists.
May-be some folks should think about why some folks complain about html, TOFU, etc.
The reason is simple: "regulars" dump the major numbers of all mails to the trash bin to keep the amount of time within limits.
Only those mails with an interesting subject, were you can get the intention within the first, say 10 lines, and which are easily readable (90% of all html does not qualify as such) will be "browsed", even less will be read, the rest goes straight to the trash-bin - unread :)
Ralf
Paul Howarth wrote:
<snip>
I much prefer mailing lists to forums personally, and if this list was to become forum-only, I wouldn't be here. It's just too much hassle to trawl through forums IMHO.
Paul.
Absolutely! Forums remind me of webmail which reminds me of AOL which reminds me of Windows and DUN and.....
Digest works swell for reading and it's no big deal to reply via gmane.
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 07:37:29 -0600, Robert kerplop@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Paul Howarth wrote:
Digest works swell for reading and it's no big deal to reply via gmane.
Sure, as long as people remember to fix their subject lines when replying to digest messages that works fine.
And I also agree that it helps to use an e-mail reader that can thread properly. I was using my Yahoo account for these messages until a few weeks ago, and now I am using Gmail. Gmail will automatically group all threads into "conversations". It's easy to simply click on a conversation and archive it. It's also easy to filter out conversations and send them directly to the trash (i.e. the suck/flame threads).
But I want to put my comments here as well about the original post. I also agree with Darren (original poster) that the contents of these messages lately have been out of hand.
Of course the last thing Darren wanted was for this thread to turn into another "fedora sucks" or "fedora flame #1"... or was it? Look how many responses there are already. This thread has nothing to do with making contributions or helping solve people's problems. Darren complains about flame-bait, and look what has happened.
This board should be about us making suggestions and helping each other. If you want to start another message list just to talk about message lists, go ahead. But leave this one for issues involving Fedora, not the posters.
Is the Fedora Community under threat? Certainly, and it's because of posts like this.
Just my 2 cents.
I don't claim to be an expert in anything... Linux, or mailing lists... but I do try to help out other people, and in return, when I have an issue, I hope other people will help me out.
On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 10:59:58AM +0000, Paul Howarth paul@city-fan.org wrote:
This mailing list is already available in forum format at: http://fcp.homelinux.org/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=10
Also, GMANE offers it as a blog, with replies as comments to a post:
http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
Or as a newsgroup (this seems to me to be the best way):
nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
Or as an RSS feed:
http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
They've also got all the *other* OSS mailing lists you read, so it's handy and all in once place. :-)
-Rich
D. D. Brierton said: [snip]
Remember that at this moment, with CVS (or is it SVN now?) access still not opened up,
Oh?
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-December/msg00605.htm...
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-December/msg00539.htm...
On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 11:35 -0500, William Hooper wrote:
D. D. Brierton said: [snip]
Remember that at this moment, with CVS (or is it SVN now?) access still not opened up,
Oh?
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-December/msg00605.htm...
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-December/msg00539.htm...
Ah. That's great news. I didn't notice this being announced.
Best, Darren
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 09:02:52 +0000, D. D. Brierton darren@dzr-web.com wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high.
the chance to move some of the volume to the newly created lists such as: fedora-extras-list
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
Not all of this volume problem is because of flame wars and other nonsense. Frequently difficult problems come up that nobody reading can answer. The answer to "has anyone else encounter this problem?" is almost always no. And there is a limited number of people who are experienced and generous of their time to answer questions.
This problem exists on web forums too, such as http://www.fedoraforum.org/ (on which I am a moderator). Currently we have over 10,000 registered users and hundreds of posts a day.
Hopefully the community will achieve "critical mass" so that there are enough experienced users to answer the flood of questions.
On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:44:15 -0600, John Mahowald jpmahowald@gmail.com wrote:
Not all of this volume problem is because of flame wars and other nonsense. Frequently difficult problems come up that nobody reading can answer. The answer to "has anyone else encounter this problem?" is almost always no. And there is a limited number of people who are experienced and generous of their time to answer questions.
This problem exists on web forums too, such as http://www.fedoraforum.org/ (on which I am a moderator). Currently we have over 10,000 registered users and hundreds of posts a day.
Hopefully the community will achieve "critical mass" so that there are enough experienced users to answer the flood of questions.
Many posters are asking the same questions. Fedora Core needs to have a more proactive FAQ with either more frequent updates or a better positioned link on their web page.
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:49:23 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers dag@wieers.com wrote:
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
A good email-client may help you cope with the volume. Threading is a must.
The fedora mailinglist has become a general forum for all things Fedora (except development and testing related items, which have their own mailinglists). It makes sense that most of the developers are on fedora-test and fedora-devel, rather than on this list.
It is a normal evolution with any project to move from a single to many mailinglists. It is not a threat, it makes things more viable.
I've thought about suggesting that the list be split into multiple mailing lists. Like, perhaps fedora-help and fedora-community. fedora-help could be used by people who are having a problem, and fedora-community could have the flame wars, and the slightly OT threads such as "What is your favorite..." "Why do we (do|not do) it this way..." etc. Thoughts on the idea? The fundamental problem with multiple lists seems to get people to use the correct mailing list for their issue. There are already several RedHat mailing lists available, but some seem to not get as used as this one. For example, the AMD64 list gets almost no traffic. And how many threads are here about AMD64? They aren't out of place, since they are Fedora related, but it seems so few know about the other list. There is also fedora-selinux for selinux issues, but I don't subscribe to it so I don't know what kind of volume they get. One of the big problems with list volume seems to be that most people seem to not search the archives, which I understand. I don't generally want to search the archives when someone can probably answer my question easily, but it would greatly reduce the list volume if people just did that instead of posting a question that has been beaten to death already. Something that might be good is to have an etiquette page and an official list FAQ page that people had to look at during the subscribe process. I don't know if anyone would actually read these, but it might be worth a shot. This could be very helpful for new people and potentially reduce redundant or flame-provoking posts. I agree that the list volume is way too large to keep up with everything. I have learned a lot from this list and have tried to contribute where I can, but it can take up way too much time. In an effort to help with this, I created a filter that looks for emails with areas of knowledge/interest mentioned in them and adds them to a seperate label. That has helped some, but even that selection gets several threads each day. These were just some thoughts I've had on the topic.
Jonathan
On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:54:13 -0800, Kam Leo kam.leo@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:44:15 -0600, John Mahowald jpmahowald@gmail.com wrote: Many posters are asking the same questions. Fedora Core needs to have a more proactive FAQ with either more frequent updates or a better positioned link on their web page.
Well if people would learn to search the archives before posting a repeat message, that would resolve a lot of issues as well. Then the FAQ doesn't need to be extensive, and can start with an item about how to search the archives.
David ----------------------------------------------------------------------- There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary, and those who don't.
D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Warren Togami wtogami@redhat.com
On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:00:37 -1000, Warren Togami wtogami@redhat.com wrote:
D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
while I agree with the problem, I dont agree with the solution. forums are going to worsen the problem rather than resolve it. what we need is a good set of guidelines thats *documented* well in an official manner
while the community itself can enforce these guidelines, it needs more official direction from the fedora project
From: "Warren Togami" wtogami@redhat.com
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. {^_^}
On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 02:00 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
Warren, thanks for posting here. Funnily enough I'd already read the above on your blog (via the Fedora People planet), and was planning on posting something to this list about it.
Obviously, you know that I agree with you about what the problems are. (I wrote original post you replied to.) But I don't know that I agree with your proposed solution. I personally find web forums (e.g. the nvidia linux forum) totally unusable -- I can never find anything on them, I find them hard to navigate, etc. Also, you are effectively ghettoising end users (and we're not all clueless newbies, you know) from the developers, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. I think that what we need is a greater effort on the part of us, the community, to enforce good behaviour, so that the developers might eventually feel that they might actually come back to the more general purpose lists.
Having said that, it may turn out that you have the most kick-arse web forum software in mind that would allay my doubts. Personally I find mailing lists to be quite clunky, even with a good mail reader like Evolution with filtering and threading. I never understood why open source projects have such a penchant for mailing lists, when clearly that isn't really what email was designed for and is what usenet/NNTP is designed for. Especially given that you can set up a newsserver which requires a username and password to access it, and which can be set to only carry local groups and retain the messages forever (which would solve many of the problems involved with searching the lists as well).
Anyway, I'm all for thinking of ways to improve how we as a community communicate with each other. But I'm sceptical that web forums are the way forward.
Best, Darren
On Saturday 05 February 2005 06:00, Warren Togami wrote:
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
To echo jdow's sentiment, "eeeewwwwwwww!" If web forums are the future, I know from past experiences, I'm unlikely to visit very often since they're such a royal pain in the keester to use. Will the messages at least be archived in a sensible manner so that they can be downloaded and read in a normal mail reader offline?
Regards, Mike Klinke
On Sat, Feb 05, 2005 at 02:00:37AM -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
I strenuously disagree with your point #1:
1) This would shift ONLY end-user lists, not development lists. Those same engineers are likely to ignore the end-user support lists anyway. Nothing is lost.
Actually, some of us like to help out on the end-user side of things *and* hate most web forums.
Please at the very, very least, don't do something like the widespread non-threading horrible interface "BB" style forums. Ideally, it'd be something like this: http://news.lugnet.com/.
Additionally, like Lugnet, it'd be nice if the forums had an NNTP backend. The "how to do a discussion group" problem is already solved, and most web forums just reinvent that wheel horribly badly.
I think a web forum could be very helpful to many newer-to-the-net users, but there's no reason not to eat our cake *and* have it too.
So what about those of us who are trying to support the end users? Will we at least get web fora that are usable for us?
Will I be able, as an individual user, to flag threads and posts for later attention (when I've had a chance to think, or got to the right location with the right software to check out a problem)?
Will the software automatically mark which threads and which posts I've read, to help me catch up with what I've read and what I haven't read?
(And that's without such niceties as "scoring based on poster and on topic", which is what keeps the list sane for me).
I know you say that "fedora-list and fedora-test-list would NOT close". But you will still need knowledgeable people on the fora to do the user support, and we're going to need fora that are enjoyable enough for us to want to use them. If we find we're battling the software, if we move on, that's not going to do much for the community you have built up.
And speaking of which, I think the concept of FUDcon as "a place for the community for meet" is going to be incredibly divisive *if* you assume that the people there represent the community.
I think it's going to be very North America-centric. I just don't have time or money to get over to Boston on the amount of notice that we were given. Fedora users are not necessarily commercial users.
Get opinions there, sure. Come up with ideas, float concepts, have arguments. But if decisions are made "having consulted the community", you're kidding yourselves.
Maybe we need separate fedora-user and fedora-directions fora.
Maybe it's time for me to re-examine where and how I want to help.
James.
On Sat, Feb 05, 2005 at 04:25:10PM +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
I think it's going to be very North America-centric. I just don't have time or money to get over to Boston on the amount of notice that we were given. Fedora users are not necessarily commercial users. Get opinions there, sure. Come up with ideas, float concepts, have arguments. But if decisions are made "having consulted the community", you're kidding yourselves.
Of course.
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:00:37 -1000, Warren Togami wtogami@redhat.com wrote:
D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
while I agree with the problem, I dont agree with the solution. forums are going to worsen the problem rather than resolve it. what we need is a good set of guidelines thats *documented* well in an official manner
while the community itself can enforce these guidelines, it needs more official direction from the fedora project
Hi,
I agree. Personally, I learned *a lot* from this list, but I'm sure I'd just have given up it it was a web forum. They just plain suck. A *much* better solution would just be to make it a usenet discussion group.
By the way, what is the problem with having too many users here? isn't this the fedora-/users/ group? If there are too many user/dumb questions, maybe you could just start a usenet called /fedora-help/ or something like it. Then the /fedora-users/ title would be preserved for the other discussions...
On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 02:00 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
We have at least two problems: reduced participation and interest from developers, and the ability and interest to help USERS who, in their huge majority, do not have that "engineer" mentality nor any idea of how to use many other features of the Internet/Linux community that the veterans rely upon.
Your solution ignores the users, particularly users who help others. A *very* important omission.
I personally use a few web forums (particularly http://www.piperchat.com since I am an active pilot), and their usability, convenience, and scalability is severely limited. I have to go check to see if there are new messages, the web interface introduces needless delay, I *must* be online at the time I want to read messages (that's a biggie for many people)... there are a lot of objections.
Remember that *quite a lot* of the support users get is from other users. I've been helping others on this and redhat lists since at least eight years ago... and I can tell you with 100% certainty, my participation and contribution WILL GO DOWN if we move to web fora. They are simply more difficult, more time-consuming, less convenient, and less flexible than mailing lists.
That being said, I do also agree that Usenet solved this problem, and did it extraordinarily well, ages ago. Web fora are reinventions of that particular wheel, and we now have news-to-mail gateways, GUI news clients, web interfaces to NNTP... why make an inferior solution the primary one? Create a newsgroup hierarchy, set up a gateway to the web for those users who want/need it, and we're done.
Ranking the three possible solutions by the functionality and benefits they can provide to this community as a whole, and attempting to include in my thought process developers, expert users, and newbies, I believe the winners are:
1. Usenet hierarchy 2. Mailing lists 3. Web fora
I am always pleased and happy to see Red Hat's concern for its users, and I have never met (virtually, even) a Red Hat employee whom I didn't respect and like. That is a Great Thing [tm]. In this case, however, I vehemently disagree with your proposed solution. I think it's horrible and will significantly harm the interactions of this community.
I thought this was going to be a brief note, but hey... just say "no" to web fora. Bad, bad idea.
Cheers,
Gustavo Seabra wrote:
By the way, what is the problem with having too many users here? isn't this the fedora-/users/ group? If there are too many user/dumb questions, maybe you could just start a usenet called /fedora-help/ or something like it. Then the /fedora-users/ title would be preserved for the other discussions...
You know, I've been on this list for getting on to a year. I think this is the first time I've seen anyone from Red Hat address how this mailing list is working.
Wouldn't it have been nice: wouldn't it have been *community-minded*: wouldn't it have been polite for Red Hat to have asked *us*, on *this list* "is there a problem? What can be done?" Rather than come up with solutions on their own?
Because I can think of a very easy way to improve this list: use the community! Use volunteers! A busy list *is* a community, and it's probably the biggest one Fedora has.
* Reword the standard list signature! Put a link to the FAQ in there. At least have a "before posting, please read this link".
If Red Hat Legal wants a FAQ that doesn't mention "how to install MP3 support", fine. We can do that. We can mention "other RPM repositories" (and explain the legal situation) if necessary. Get some trusted people from the community (like the current fedorafaq.org maintainers, if they're happy to work like that). If you must, and get them to sign a legal form.
And make all this "please read this" obvious when users join up.
There are standard ways of handling Frequently Asked Questions that have been in use for well over a decade. If frequently asked questions are a problem, and this is supposed to be a community- oriented list, *use the community standard solution*.
* We need a "posting norms" guideline that we can point out when necessary. It doesn't have to be long: this might do for a start:
"Please: No HTML Trim quotes as much as is reasonable Don't quote an entire digest Put your text underneath what you're replying to Keep it civil!"
* Have *some* way for issues raised on this list to be brought back to the Fedora developers. If developers can't read the whole list, have a few trusted volunteers who can summarise in a line or two and provide links.
* If the list owners aren't going to read the list, let them have trusted volunteers who can point out situations that need attention. And then, at *least*, post a "keep it civil!" note!
Mutt highlights for me, in red, all the e-mails from redhat.com addresses. Whenever someone from Red Hat posts to the list, I read it.
So I don't think I've missed anything from them.
I'm posting this not in the hopes that anyone from Red Hat will take it seriously, but so at least I know I tried.
Sorry. Rant mode off.
James.
--> Fedora Users & Developers Conference, hosted by Boston University <-- February 18th, 2005 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon1
Think I'll sneak a day off work to stop by. I started with FC1 and ended up running about 10 Fedora Core servers, our NCD users liked them so much we 'retired' the sparcs we were using. I don't usually do these sorts of meetings, but it would be cool to see what goes on. The website doesn't list a fee, is this $1000/minute like Usenix?
Jason Powers
jdow wrote:
From: "Warren Togami" wtogami@redhat.com
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. {^_^}
Yes. And then there was this shopkeeper who was upset that his shop was so disorderly until he ran off all his customers. EXCELLENT SOLUTION!
Warren Togami wrote:
D. D. Brierton wrote:
I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Warren Togami wtogami@redhat.com
Speaking as an end-user, I agree that the current mailing list leaves something to be desired as a medium for "end-user" support. But then, end-user support has never been Red Hat's strongest suit in my book.
Drawing on first hand experiences in installing and running RH 4.1/4.2, RH 7.1, RH 8.0, and now Fedora Core 2, I say unequivocally that the fedora-list has provided the strongest end-user support. Fundamentally, the proposition that Red Hat has ever considered providing support for ALL types of Fedora users an objective is dubious. That point was driven home by Red Hat's change in business plan to offer official support only for RHEL and unilateral suspension of support agreements for RH 8 (five months early in my case) and RH 9. Spare us the pretensions of effecting change to improve or enhance support for end-users.
If Red hat wants to limit the population of fedora-list to system administrators, it should make that point clear at the outset. If Red Hat wants to promote continuing expansion of the linux market and the market for linux support services, it will lend greater support to SOHO desktop end-users. Expansion of the linux market -- and breadth and depth of de-bugging feedback to Red Hat for product improvement -- can be achieved at minimum expense and effort by strengthening Fedora Core Release notes in a few places and posting new FAQs relevant to particular problem areas which surface with each new release. Jettisoning of detailed list archives in favor of some issue summaries/abstracts for use in FAQs would also be helpful to both Red Hat and users. All arcive users encounter a tremendous amount of noise in searching for information relevant to their issue of concern.
As for the absence of regular postings to fedora-list by Red Hat engineers, maybe that is due more to the emergence of rapid responses to problems and issues from knowledgeable members of the Fedora community-at-large than to any other factor.
On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 05:17:19AM -0500, Jason Powers wrote:
Think I'll sneak a day off work to stop by. I started with FC1 and ended up running about 10 Fedora Core servers, our NCD users liked them so much we 'retired' the sparcs we were using. I don't usually do these sorts of meetings, but it would be cool to see what goes on. The website doesn't list a fee, is this $1000/minute like Usenix?
Um, yes. Payable in cash directly to me.
No, wait -- it's free. But we've got limited space and it's rapidly filling up. Registration info at http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/. (Hmm; I should change my sig to point to that page.)
Robert wrote:
jdow wrote:
From: "Warren Togami" wtogami@redhat.com
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. {^_^}
Yes. And then there was this shopkeeper who was upset that his shop was so disorderly until he ran off all his customers. EXCELLENT SOLUTION!
The point here is not /his/ solution, but I think he's just expressing what he'd do (and I believe most of us dumb-mortal-users would do as well) if the RedHat guys go ahead with this idea. That is definitely a very bad idea, one that would probably jeopardize the whole "fedora-users-community" idea. There's been plenty of solutions proposed here on this thread there are *much* better than the dreaded web forums.
I second JDow's opinion. / Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. /. If they *want* ideas, they'll certainly find within this (so far) community.
Gustavo Seabra wrote:
Robert wrote:
jdow wrote:
From: "Warren Togami" wtogami@redhat.com
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. {^_^}
Yes. And then there was this shopkeeper who was upset that his shop was so disorderly until he ran off all his customers. EXCELLENT SOLUTION!
The point here is not /his/ solution, but I think he's just expressing what he'd do (and I believe most of us dumb-mortal-users would do as well) if the RedHat guys go ahead with this idea. That is definitely a very bad idea, one that would probably jeopardize the whole "fedora-users-community" idea. There's been plenty of solutions proposed here on this thread there are *much* better than the dreaded web forums.
I second JDow's opinion. / Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. /. If they *want* ideas, they'll certainly find within this (so far) community.
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so... Unless, of course you still want to recieve 500+ e-mail messages if you are away of your computer for a day or two and could not cancel mail delivery temporarily (if you don't get the digest, of course). To each their own, I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
On 6 Feb 2005, at 19:32, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so... Unless, of course you still want to recieve 500+ e-mail messages if you are away of your computer for a day or two and could not cancel mail delivery temporarily (if you don't get the digest, of course). To each their own, I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
The main problem I see with a web interface is that's usually difficult to find things as search capabilities are limited by the remote engine and/or remote storage policy. By using NNTP I can stay informed of new messages, I can use a nive GUI application of my choice (like Thunderbird) and *I* decide the storage policy: if I want to keep every message for several years, I can.
NNTP is much more flexible for me.
On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so...
It's a control issue... When you have a few thousand messages a day to parse you're before off doing it in the client of your on choosing, with your own filtering and your onw tools that with a web-interface which not matter how rich and well intentioned is just another bulliten-board interface. In my case the combo of procmail - spamassassin - duplicate filtering- pgp envelope - pine. allows me to keep track of and partcipate in a heck of a lot more mailing lists than just this one. it isn't even the highest volume one if you can believe that. if it were a web forum I'd probably dredge it with google but I certainly wouldn't keep up with it.
joelja
Unless, of course you still want to recieve 500+ e-mail messages if you are away of your computer for a day or two and could not cancel mail delivery temporarily (if you don't get the digest, of course). To each their own, I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
On 6 Feb 2005, at 19:32, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so... Unless, of course you still want to recieve 500+ e-mail messages if you are away of your computer for a day or two and could not cancel mail delivery temporarily (if you don't get the digest, of course). To each their own, I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
The main problem I see with a web interface is that's usually difficult to find things as search capabilities are limited by the remote engine and/or remote storage policy. By using NNTP I can stay informed of new messages, I can use a nive GUI application of my choice (like Thunderbird) and *I* decide the storage policy: if I want to keep every message for several years, I can.
NNTP is much more flexible for me.
And, it /can/ have a web interface, for those who like web fora.
On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 12:32:44PM -0600, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so... Unless, of
They tend to have very poor interfaces, with no threading, and no good way of keeping track of what posts you've read and which you haven't. Most basically present a "spreadsheet" of posts.
I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
With any half-decent mail client/environment, the fedora lists don't need to go to your inbox.
But I think the *best* solution is an NNTP backend with an available web front end, because I recognize that many people don't know any better. *big grin*
Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 12:32:44PM -0600, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so... Unless, of
They tend to have very poor interfaces, with no threading, and no good way of keeping track of what posts you've read and which you haven't. Most basically present a "spreadsheet" of posts.
I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
With any half-decent mail client/environment, the fedora lists don't need to go to your inbox.
But I think the *best* solution is an NNTP backend with an available web front end, because I recognize that many people don't know any better. *big grin*
Don't get me wrong I see this list with Thunderbird set to re-direct all fedora* mail to a Fedora directory under my local folders directory, but I'm also an avid web-forums reader of variuos communities, and have never had any trouble with say V-Bulletin (yeah, I know their fame) message boards, even on some servers with as high traffic as our list here. I guess it's up to the site admins to set a good set of options for archiving and a good search tool (with an *SQL backend most probably) to make it easy for the users to find what they're looking for. In any case, since I use both interfaces to many communities I periodically check, I'm comfortable with any of that... Still I think that the NNTP server with both a web-PHP and usual client interface is the best bet and would provide the best control for Red Hat to administer too.
On Sat, Feb 05, 2005 at 10:03:20AM -0600, Mike Klinke wrote:
On Saturday 05 February 2005 06:00, Warren Togami wrote:
Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
To echo jdow's sentiment, "eeeewwwwwwww!" If web forums are the future, I know from past experiences, I'm unlikely to visit very often since they're such a royal pain in the keester to use. Will the messages at least be archived in a sensible manner so that they can be downloaded and read in a normal mail reader offline?
Regards, Mike Klinke
I don't know where is opposition to the list is coming from but I see no real problem with the list as it exists. I am currently not using Usenet and am not that exited to start. The volume on the list as I have said before comes from having questions on all three Fedora versions packaged into one list. In many cases one can';t tell which FCx version is being used by the questioner. For example, recently a brief interchange occurred on whether OO is written in Java. Well FC1 and FC3 have different OO setups so the question is hard to deal with is the Fedora distribution is not identified. ======================================================================= Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987 ------------------------------------------- Aaron Konstam Computer Science Trinity University One Trinity Place. San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
telephone: (210)-999-7484 email:akonstam@trinity.edu
On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 12:32, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so...
They are really unhandy if you are interested in more than a couple of things. You certainly can't expect the people with answers to your questions to hop around through dozens of them just so you don't have to sort your inbox...
Unless, of course you still want to recieve 500+ e-mail messages if you are away of your computer for a day or two and could not cancel mail delivery temporarily (if you don't get the digest, of course).
That's not a problem. Procmail or most mailers will sort them in a jiffy and you can catch up at your own speed.
To each their own, I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea...
Who's going to do that extra work looking for questions to answer? If a question drops in your mailbox and you happen to know the answer it's a couple of seconds to solve someone's problem. Who's going to bounce though a bunch of web sites for that?
thought i would add my 2 cents in o this discussion... my personal preference is to use gmail, easy to sort, easy to search my account, and if i need to i can delete what i want. as for a web based forum the codeproject.com seems to have a very easy to use interface. thats just my thoughts tho so take 'em with a grain of salt :)
On Feb 6, 2005, Gain Paolo Mureddu gmureddu@prodigy.net.mx wrote:
[I] have never had any trouble with say V-Bulletin (yeah, I know their fame) message boards, even on some servers with as high traffic as our list here. I guess it's up to the site admins to set a good set of options for archiving and a good search tool (with an *SQL backend most probably) to make it easy for the users to find what they're looking for.
If the main issue is to enable users to find answers to questions that have been answered before, a good search engine in the mailing list archives would be fine.
But people willing to help can't easily keep track of new questions yet to be answered, how are we ever going to create the good, searchable archive of answered questions?
Web forums are just too time-consuming if you want to have the choice of keeping up with everything that is discussed in a forum. Downloading the entire forum in background and then skimming through the threads and reading whatever looks interesting without having to wait a few seconds to download the contents of whatever topic/thread/message you choose to read, is far more efficient than clicking on a topic/thread/message, waiting a few seconds until it's displayed and then reading its contents in just as many seconds.
Warren's posting focuses on part of the problem, namely, that of creating a good environment for people to find help with problems they run into. I believe a good searchable web front-end to any forum (be it e-mail, news or your typical web forum) could accomplish just that.
The other important part of the problem is to help people willing to help answer questions. I doubt any web forum interface would enable people willing to help to do so efficiently and effectively, and without those answers, the web forum would be just a board on which people would post questions and not get answers. In order to be efficient for the helpers, a web forum would have to have a gateway to e-mail and/or news, so as to enable helpers to remove the latency of web interactions, and let them (err, us? :-) organize the information that is most suitable to them. And if there's a gateway to e-mail and/or news, e-mail and/or news might as well be a first-class entry point to the forum, just as much as the corresponding web forum.
Web forums just force you into a specific form to display and access information. They're intrinsically against the principles behind Free Software, that are meant to enable you to modify the software in whatever way suits you best. Web forums that offer the information in forms meant for other programs to handle, in the form of web services, XML-RPC, whatever, will let you do that, but they require people to reinvent wheels not only on the server side, but also on client sides, because good, threaded mail/news reading programs are unlikely to support such custom web forum protocols. I.e., you lose no matter how you look at web forums.
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 02:19 -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
how are we ever going to create the good, searchable archive of answered questions?
Just an idea, How about a desktop applet that does web searches on the archive and other sources? Maybe something added to the panel that would send out a request and parse/ return the results. Other sites could be added as well.
This of course won't help for most questions, but it may stem the tide a little bit.
micheal wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 02:19 -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
how are we ever going to create the good, searchable archive of answered questions?
Just an idea, How about a desktop applet that does web searches on the archive and other sources? Maybe something added to the panel that would send out a request and parse/ return the results. Other sites could be added as well.
This of course won't help for most questions, but it may stem the tide a little bit.
I think that's a great idea.
On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 22:38 -0600, micheal wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 02:19 -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
how are we ever going to create the good, searchable archive of answered questions?
Just an idea, How about a desktop applet that does web searches on the archive and other sources? Maybe something added to the panel that would send out a request and parse/ return the results. Other sites could be added as well.
This of course won't help for most questions, but it may stem the tide a little bit.
That sounds like a workable idea - an applet wouldn't take up much space nor would it require much training or help to use. An applet of this kind obviously would need to be able to connect to various sites that offer Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core help or solutions, and the applet would need to incoporate each site into its search (possibly in a preferences panel, there could be a list of sites that the applet searches for?) and like you say, parse the results and return the ones that are most valid and pertaining to the user's question.
I'd be all for something like this.
Jared
On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 19:23 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
Because I can think of a very easy way to improve this list: use the community! Use volunteers! A busy list *is* a community, and it's probably the biggest one Fedora has.
FWIW, I plan to add a little "community" section to the Basics FAQ that explains how to be a polite member of the community.
-Max
From: "Gain Paolo Mureddu" gmureddu@prodigy.net.mx
Gustavo Seabra wrote:
Robert wrote:
jdow wrote:
From: "Warren Togami" wtogami@redhat.com
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/
Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details.
Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. {^_^}
Yes. And then there was this shopkeeper who was upset that his shop was so disorderly until he ran off all his customers. EXCELLENT SOLUTION!
The point here is not /his/ solution, but I think he's just expressing what he'd do (and I believe most of us dumb-mortal-users would do as well) if the RedHat guys go ahead with this idea. That is definitely a very bad idea, one that would probably jeopardize the whole "fedora-users-community" idea. There's been plenty of solutions proposed here on this thread there are *much* better than the dreaded web forums.
I second JDow's opinion. / Eeeewwwww, web forums. Bye guys. /. If they *want* ideas, they'll certainly find within this (so far) community.
I still don't get why are Web forums so dreaded, but that's just me... I haven't seen a *single* reason why not to make it so... Unless, of course you still want to recieve 500+ e-mail messages if you are away of your computer for a day or two and could not cancel mail delivery temporarily (if you don't get the digest, of course). To each their own, I just don't get why people don't like the web forums idea... Maybe a private NTTP server would be more suitable for this, where Red Hat could even set the caducity of messages. You still need a helper application to read the messages like Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever, and still avoid having *your* inbox flooded.
20 years of experience with messaging systems ranging from the late lamented BYTE Information Exchange to nntp to mailing lists and of course web boards lead me to the conclusion that of all the alternatives web messaging systems are pretty uniformly dreadful, even the one I made for myself for reading BIX offline.
Any such system should support "guaranteed threading unless the poster screws up seriously." Mailing lists and nntp fall down here. Web boards are actually pretty good in that regard. The old BIX CoSy system was excellent in this regard.
Any such system should include noise reduction features. I consider nntp as a noise enhancement tool. Web boards are generally noise enhancement tools of modest to extreme degrees. Mailing lists enhance noise as well as provide a built in dampening mechanism. My email tools lead to a set of VERY good noise reduction tools even with poor threading. CoSy as we left it when BIX died provided twit filters, thread killing, and so forth. It also provided "forever memory" that made a troll's bad behavior a rather permanent part of the record. That does lad to some additional civility. Now, a custom nntp can also provide this "forever memory" which might make it a good thing.
Any such system should provide some filtering for potential malware inclusions. HTML is entirely too flexible in this regard. Email at least is plain text reader accessible. And a private nntp could also be plain text accessible. Custom pretty much makes this list plain text. With nntp tools out there we'd have to rely on custom as well. Heh, CoSy WAS pure plain text, no HTML need apply. (Well, it DID have some provisions for NAPLPS that nobody ever used.)
On the whole I have nice filtering setup for email already. I don't even have a newsreader that I use at present and don't want to set one up. (I REALLY find nntp repellant, almost as repellant as HTML. I guess I must figure cute is for puppies and little children, not for serious endeavors. And this should be a serious discussion group.)
But then, FC3 sorta drove me away to the point I'm giving Mandrake a serious test. So don't lay too much stock on what I say at this point. Maybe make my vote a tenth of a vote. I'm mostly here for old times sake.
{^_^}
I have to admit that even though I have worked with Linux a little over the years, I'm just a newbie with many things... But I have to ask, why so many dependent rpms are missing from the fedora distro Cds. I wanted to use gcc, so I start trying to install and like other things requiring dependent libs, gcc requires, in this instance, kernel-headers which is not on the CDs. Can someone tell me why? Alan
On Monday 07 February 2005 01:11, Alan McDonald wrote:
I have to admit that even though I have worked with Linux a little over the years, I'm just a newbie with many things... But I have to ask, why so many dependent rpms are missing from the fedora distro Cds. I wanted to use gcc, so I start trying to install and like other things requiring dependent libs, gcc requires, in this instance, kernel-headers which is not on the CDs. Can someone tell me why? Alan
The distro is not 'incomplete' but your install was I suspect. You did install all the 'development' stuffs? If not, then you should do so before squawking about missing stuff that you may have left out on purpose, or through not understanding the ramifications of leaving it out. Either way its not the distros fault.
On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 05:11:55PM +1100, Alan McDonald wrote:
But I have to ask, why so many dependent rpms are missing from the fedora distro Cds. I wanted to use gcc, so I start trying to install and like other things requiring dependent libs, gcc requires, in this instance, kernel-headers which is not on the CDs.
$ rpm -q --whatprovides kernel-headers glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.87
It might have been more helpful to title your post "can't find kernel-headers package" -- your current one seems a bit over-worried. :)
On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 05:11:55PM +1100, Alan McDonald wrote:
But I have to ask, why so many dependent rpms are missing from
the fedora
distro Cds. I wanted to use gcc, so I start trying to install
and like other
things requiring dependent libs, gcc requires, in this instance, kernel-headers which is not on the CDs.
$ rpm -q --whatprovides kernel-headers glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.87
It might have been more helpful to title your post "can't find kernel-headers package" -- your current one seems a bit over-worried. :)
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@mattdm.org
well now I might be even more worried because the anser to whatprovides on my Fedora Core 2 is not glibc-kernheaders but kernel-headers-2.4-9.34 and that file is not present on my distro.. What else don't I undertand thanks Alan
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 17:48 +1100, Alan McDonald wrote:
On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 05:11:55PM +1100, Alan McDonald wrote:
But I have to ask, why so many dependent rpms are missing from
the fedora
distro Cds. I wanted to use gcc, so I start trying to install
and like other
things requiring dependent libs, gcc requires, in this instance, kernel-headers which is not on the CDs.
Did this say the package kernel-headers? If not then it is just telling you the headers are not available.
$ rpm -q --whatprovides kernel-headers glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.87
It might have been more helpful to title your post "can't find kernel-headers package" -- your current one seems a bit over-worried. :)
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@mattdm.org
well now I might be even more worried because the anser to whatprovides on my Fedora Core 2 is not glibc-kernheaders but kernel-headers-2.4-9.34 and that file is not present on my distro.. What else don't I undertand thanks Alan
I think Matt's answer was from FC3, not FC2.
The distro CDs (disk 1 or 2) should have the required package, and in FC2 IIRC the headers are in the kernel-source RPM which is on disk 2.
With FC3 (and I think in a later update in FC2), they have removed the kernel-souce RPM and moved the headers to another package since a lot of people did not use the source but often had to install it just for the headers when compiling other things that required the kernel headers but nothing else from the kernel source tree.
The kernel-source package is also available from the fedora site at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/
BTW, I reread your message about the required kernel-headers-2.4-9.34 and then checked what is in FC2 and FC1. FC1 starts with kernel 2.4.22 FC2 starts with kernel 2.6.5 However, kernel-utils is 2.4-9 in both. The required package would imply you need headers for the 2.4 kernel, but FC2 has never had a 2.4 kernel. It started with 2.6.5 kernel.
I wonder what version of gcc you are installing and where you got it? It doesn't seem likely that it is a fedora package if it requires another package that is not provided by fedora.
With FC2 you should be able to do a "yum install gcc " and it should identify any dependencies and install them for you. (Of course this presumes that you have an internet connection for this machine.)
Try that before you say the distribution is broken. I have never had a problem using/installing any software package in the distribution using yum. OTOH, I have at times gotten into "dependency hell" when trying to do the same thing manually with rpm.
HTH Jeff
On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 02:03:31AM -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
I think Matt's answer was from FC3, not FC2.
I checked on both, actually.
FC2 has glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.44, and FC3 glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.87. I don't think there's been updates for either.
I've been wrong before, though. :)
The distro CDs (disk 1 or 2) should have the required package, and in FC2 IIRC the headers are in the kernel-source RPM which is on disk 2.
There's also the separate kernel-headers (well, glibc-kernheaders) package. As the later/current name indicates, these are supposed to match the kernel your glibc was built against, not necessarily the currently running kernel.
BTW, I reread your message about the required kernel-headers-2.4-9.34 and then checked what is in FC2 and FC1. FC1 starts with kernel 2.4.22 FC2 starts with kernel 2.6.5 However, kernel-utils is 2.4-9 in both.
Yeah, kernel-utils, but not kernel-headers. :)
The required package would imply you need headers for the 2.4 kernel, but FC2 has never had a 2.4 kernel. It started with 2.6.5 kernel.
Apparently, the glibc package built on FC1 or RHEL for both of them. Kinda weird, now that you mention it. :) Hmm, and the devel tree (rawhide) package is 2.4-9.1.89 .... quite odd!
I wonder what version of gcc you are installing and where you got it? It doesn't seem likely that it is a fedora package if it requires another package that is not provided by fedora.
Stuff like this happens sometimes -- for example, some packages still require "XFree86-devel" even though that's been replaced with xorg-devel. RPM can handle this fine because the replacement packages can explicitly tell the system that the provide another package name in addition to their own. In this case, the glibc-headers package requires kernel-headers, and glibc-headers is required by glibc-devel, and glibc-devel is required by gcc.
You know the famous saying: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to use RPM directly instead of using Yum." Or at least, I think that's how it goes. :)
On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 02:19:22AM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
On Feb 6, 2005, Gain Paolo Mureddu gmureddu@prodigy.net.mx wrote:
[I] have never had any trouble with say V-Bulletin (yeah, I know their fame) message boards, even on some servers with as high traffic as our list here. I guess it's up to the site admins to set a good set of options for archiving and a good search tool (with an *SQL backend most probably) to make it easy for the users to find what they're looking for.
If the main issue is to enable users to find answers to questions that have been answered before, a good search engine in the mailing list archives would be fine.
But people willing to help can't easily keep track of new questions yet to be answered, how are we ever going to create the good, searchable archive of answered questions?
Web forums are just too time-consuming if you want to have the choice of keeping up with everything that is discussed in a forum. Downloading the entire forum in background and then skimming through the threads and reading whatever looks interesting without having to wait a few seconds to download the contents of whatever topic/thread/message you choose to read, is far more efficient than clicking on a topic/thread/message, waiting a few seconds until it's displayed and then reading its contents in just as many seconds.
Warren's posting focuses on part of the problem, namely, that of creating a good environment for people to find help with problems they run into. I believe a good searchable web front-end to any forum (be it e-mail, news or your typical web forum) could accomplish just that.
The other important part of the problem is to help people willing to help answer questions. I doubt any web forum interface would enable people willing to help to do so efficiently and effectively, and without those answers, the web forum would be just a board on which people would post questions and not get answers. In order to be efficient for the helpers, a web forum would have to have a gateway to e-mail and/or news, so as to enable helpers to remove the latency of web interactions, and let them (err, us? :-) organize the information that is most suitable to them. And if there's a gateway to e-mail and/or news, e-mail and/or news might as well be a first-class entry point to the forum, just as much as the corresponding web forum.
Web forums just force you into a specific form to display and access information. They're intrinsically against the principles behind Free Software, that are meant to enable you to modify the software in whatever way suits you best. Web forums that offer the information in forms meant for other programs to handle, in the form of web services, XML-RPC, whatever, will let you do that, but they require people to reinvent wheels not only on the server side, but also on client sides, because good, threaded mail/news reading programs are unlikely to support such custom web forum protocols. I.e., you lose no matter how you look at web forums.
--
I just want to second what has been said above. This proposed switch is just a bad idea.
On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 15:04 -0600, akonstam@trinity.edu wrote:
I don't know where is opposition to the list is coming from but I see no real problem with the list as it exists.
Good point, and one I would like to echo. This list *can* continue as it is. It is not actively causing harm to the community.
Then again, it could be improved:
- Better searching of archives - More flexible ways to access its content - Greater ease for newbies in learning its use - Greater ease for experts in wading through 8,000 messages/month trying to find questions to answer - Greater control over malware
Probably a few more I've missed off the top of my head. But moving from the mailing list to web fora is not going to improve anything, and will certainly cause some harm.
1. I'm nearly the most-prolific poster on Piper Chat (www.piperchat.com) and it watches to see whether there's a reply to a conversation in which I participate. That's nice for newbies. However, actively trying to find new things that might be of interest to me entails a daily visit to the site, trawling the various areas to see if something was posted. Takes a good five minutes of my time, and that's on a board that gets 5-10 messages a day! Bleagh.
If fedora-list were only fedora-webfora, I would find it so difficult and so time-consuming to help others that my current activity level would be severely curtailed. I can go through a day's posts in fedora- list within five to ten minutes... I cannot do that with web fora.
Without people who want to help others, or with any marked reduction in those people, the Fedora community suffers grievous harm.
2. Adding independent web fora to the mailing list (remember, Warren said fedora-list would not close) is a recipe for disaster. Some people would move to the web fora, some would stay on the mailing list, very few (almost none?) would monitor both, and you then have a fragmented community. And I'll bet you that most of the experts stay on the mailing list, leaving the web fora an empty shell that's not very useful to newbies since a neat interface is no substitute for content.
Let's find something that helps everyone, I say. So I repeat: let us move to NNTP as a *base* protocol, with news-to-mail and news-to-web gateways so that each person may choose whatever tool/interface they prefer. All those protocols, gateways, and interfaces already exist! No need to reinvent the wheel here.
If someone objects to NNTP, I am willing to listen. But please, let proposed solutions be those that ADD flexibility and robustness instead of removing it.
Cheers,
On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 15:47 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Who's going to do that extra work looking for questions to answer? If a question drops in your mailbox and you happen to know the answer it's a couple of seconds to solve someone's problem. Who's going to bounce though a bunch of web sites for that?
I would *like* to! I've had fun trying to help others and hanging out on this community over the last decade. However, I believe that participating in the same way on a web forum will be impossible for me.
Cheers,
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 09:16, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
Who's going to do that extra work looking for questions to answer? If a question drops in your mailbox and you happen to know the answer it's a couple of seconds to solve someone's problem. Who's going to bounce though a bunch of web sites for that?
I would *like* to! I've had fun trying to help others and hanging out on this community over the last decade. However, I believe that participating in the same way on a web forum will be impossible for me.
The one thing I could see as an improvement over the current mailing list and bugzilla for fedora users would be to add a wiki that would be maintained mostly by a team of volunteers who would collate the frequently-asked questions on the list into stock answers on the wiki. Then much of the clutter on the mailling list could be avoided by searching the wiki first, and if new users don't recognize the symptoms well enough to find the answer themselves, the mailing list response would only have to be a pointer to the wiki entry. Issues that are real system bugs should get filed into bugzilla and things that are common operator mistakes/misconceptions or that have simple workaround solutions could become wiki entries that are easily updated as the situations change.
Les Mikesell wrote:
The one thing I could see as an improvement over the current mailing list and bugzilla for fedora users would be to add a wiki that would be maintained mostly by a team of volunteers who would collate the frequently-asked questions on the list into stock answers on the wiki. Then much of the clutter on the mailling list could be avoided by searching the wiki first, and if new users don't recognize the symptoms well enough to find the answer themselves, the mailing list response would only have to be a pointer to the wiki entry.
These new users would be the same people that don't read fedorafaq.org, wouldn't they? That answers many of the questions ansked here, particularly regarding NTFS, but it doesn't stop people asking.
Issues that are real system bugs should get filed into bugzilla and things that are common operator mistakes/misconceptions or that have simple workaround solutions could become wiki entries that are easily updated as the situations change.
I think it's a good idea actually, though it would be nice if the mailing list sign-up site mentioned the FAQ/Wiki as a place to look before posting.
Paul.
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 11:46, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 09:16, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
Who's going to do that extra work looking for questions to answer? If a question drops in your mailbox and you happen to know the answer it's a couple of seconds to solve someone's problem. Who's going to bounce though a bunch of web sites for that?
I would *like* to! I've had fun trying to help others and hanging out on this community over the last decade. However, I believe that participating in the same way on a web forum will be impossible for me.
The one thing I could see as an improvement over the current mailing list and bugzilla for fedora users would be to add a wiki that would be maintained mostly by a team of volunteers who would collate the frequently-asked questions on the list into stock answers on the wiki. Then much of the clutter on the mailling list could be avoided by searching the wiki first, and if new users don't recognize the symptoms well enough to find the answer themselves, the mailing list response would only have to be a pointer to the wiki entry. Issues that are real system bugs should get filed into bugzilla and things that are common operator mistakes/misconceptions or that have simple workaround solutions could become wiki entries that are easily updated as the situations change.
I like that idea. The wiki would be a way to mine the various solutions proposed on the mailing list and collect them in a single place that can be searched.
Then we just need to tie that into an AI script that views new questions on the list and responds automatically with the answer in the wiki.
Detailed responses based on the wiki could be sent directly to the OP with a pointer back to the wiki posted on the list. This way people that just read the question and wonder what the answer is can find it and the OP gets detailed help directly. Such an automated response would make this very fast getting an answer instead of waiting for someone to take interest and type a response.
Scot L. Harris wrote:
I like that idea. The wiki would be a way to mine the various solutions proposed on the mailing list and collect them in a single place that can be searched.
Then we just need to tie that into an AI script that views new questions on the list and responds automatically with the answer in the wiki.
Detailed responses based on the wiki could be sent directly to the OP with a pointer back to the wiki posted on the list. This way people that just read the question and wonder what the answer is can find it and the OP gets detailed help directly. Such an automated response would make this very fast getting an answer instead of waiting for someone to take interest and type a response.
Nice idea but it would need an "AI bypass" facility for posters that have tried the solutions mentioned on the Wiki but haven't resolved their problems.
Paul.
Scot L. Harris said: [snip]
Then we just need to tie that into an AI script that views new questions on the list and responds automatically with the answer in the wiki.
The Fedora Answers Magic 8-ball... :-)
"Reply hazy, try again later."
Having a script send automatied responses probably isn't a good idea. I'm sure we've all had the tech support experience of the script grabbing onto one keyword and giving completely nonsense replies.
Having a central place to send people to for detailed replies would be good, but don't expect it to stop people from asking the same questions over and over.
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 12:00, Paul Howarth wrote:
Scot L. Harris wrote:
I like that idea. The wiki would be a way to mine the various solutions proposed on the mailing list and collect them in a single place that can be searched.
Then we just need to tie that into an AI script that views new questions on the list and responds automatically with the answer in the wiki.
Detailed responses based on the wiki could be sent directly to the OP with a pointer back to the wiki posted on the list. This way people that just read the question and wonder what the answer is can find it and the OP gets detailed help directly. Such an automated response would make this very fast getting an answer instead of waiting for someone to take interest and type a response.
Nice idea but it would need an "AI bypass" facility for posters that have tried the solutions mentioned on the Wiki but haven't resolved their problems.
Paul.
The AI would only respond to initial posts (new threads). If someone still has a problem they reply to the original thread stating that the wiki response did not work or was not applicable to their problem.
I figure the AI would trigger on specific terms or phrases.
NTF would get all the info on how to add NTF support, caveats, where to get it etc.
kernel source would get the pointer to the release notes.
ssh would get pointer to release notes (ssh -X -Y) and standard security lecture.
and so on.
There could be an additional bypass token put in the message or subject to prevent the AI from triggering on content of the message.
Les Mikesell wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 09:16, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
Who's going to do that extra work looking for questions to answer? If a question drops in your mailbox and you happen to know the answer it's a couple of seconds to solve someone's problem. Who's going to bounce though a bunch of web sites for that?
I would *like* to! I've had fun trying to help others and hanging out on this community over the last decade. However, I believe that participating in the same way on a web forum will be impossible for me.
The one thing I could see as an improvement over the current mailing list and bugzilla for fedora users would be to add a wiki that would be maintained mostly by a team of volunteers who would collate the frequently-asked questions on the list into stock answers on the wiki. Then much of the clutter on the mailling list could be avoided by searching the wiki first, and if new users don't recognize the symptoms well enough to find the answer themselves, the mailing list response would only have to be a pointer to the wiki entry. Issues that are real system bugs should get filed into bugzilla and things that are common operator mistakes/misconceptions or that have simple workaround solutions could become wiki entries that are easily updated as the situations change.
That, plus the news <--> mail <--> web feature suggested by Rodolfo, plus the applet suggested by Micheal would be a great solution. Actually, we're having a great number of good suggestions that could work well. I really hope they will be implemented some time in the near future. That brings up one other question:
*Are the people actually responsible for making these changes following this thread?*
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 10:53, Paul Howarth wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
The one thing I could see as an improvement over the current mailing list and bugzilla for fedora users would be to add a wiki that would be maintained mostly by a team of volunteers who would collate the frequently-asked questions on the list into stock answers on the wiki. Then much of the clutter on the mailling list could be avoided by searching the wiki first, and if new users don't recognize the symptoms well enough to find the answer themselves, the mailing list response would only have to be a pointer to the wiki entry.
These new users would be the same people that don't read fedorafaq.org, wouldn't they?
You mean that page that was last updated in December, has a total of 15 problems and solutions, and no way for someone to add solutions or downloadable attachments? I can see why it isn't so popular...
That answers many of the questions ansked here, particularly regarding NTFS, but it doesn't stop people asking.
But it makes the answers easy if all you have to supply is a link to an up to date page. I've seen wiki's work for several other projects - it just takes a certain critical mass for it to become the preferred place to look and submit updates.
Les Mikesell wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 10:53, Paul Howarth wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
The one thing I could see as an improvement over the current mailing list and bugzilla for fedora users would be to add a wiki that would be maintained mostly by a team of volunteers who would collate the frequently-asked questions on the list into stock answers on the wiki. Then much of the clutter on the mailling list could be avoided by searching the wiki first, and if new users don't recognize the symptoms well enough to find the answer themselves, the mailing list response would only have to be a pointer to the wiki entry.
These new users would be the same people that don't read fedorafaq.org, wouldn't they?
You mean that page that was last updated in December, has a total of 15 problems and solutions, and no way for someone to add solutions or downloadable attachments? I can see why it isn't so popular...
Actually it was last updated yesterday but your other points are still valid.
Nevertheless, it does answer the often-asked questions about NTFS and bootable floppies, yet there's no end to the number of people still asking *those* questions.
But it makes the answers easy if all you have to supply is a link to an up to date page. I've seen wiki's work for several other projects - it just takes a certain critical mass for it to become the preferred place to look and submit updates.
Has to be worth a try I think.
Paul.
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 12:18 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
I can see why it isn't so popular...
Hahahaha... just to let you know, I have about 150,000 impressions a month on all the translations of fedorafaq.org, averaging out to usually 80,000 unique visitors a month on the English version alone.
I do try to keep the FAQ updated. If you have anything that you feel like should be on there, and it isn't, please send me an email! I have a whole section of the site on how to contribute:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/contribute/
-Max
On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 07:30:21 -0800, Max Kanat-Alexander max_list@fedorafaq.org wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 12:18 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
I can see why it isn't so popular...
Hahahaha... just to let you know, I have about 150,000 impressions amonth on all the translations of fedorafaq.org, averaging out to usually 80,000 unique visitors a month on the English version alone.
I do try to keep the FAQ updated. If you have anything that you feellike should be on there, and it isn't, please send me an email! I have a whole section of the site on how to contribute:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/contribute/ -Max-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
Max, I have a few articles that are posted at fedoranews.org. If you feel that they could be of some use on your faq site, i'll send you the pages. For a peek at them... http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/jim_lawrence/network_manager/ http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/jim_lawrence/securewireless/ http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/jim_lawrence/wireless/
On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 10:34 -0500, jim lawrence wrote:
Max, I have a few articles that are posted at fedoranews.org. If you feel that they could be of some use on your faq site, i'll send you the pages. For a peek at them... http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/jim_lawrence/network_manager/ http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/jim_lawrence/securewireless/ http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/jim_lawrence/wireless/
Hey Jim. I know that the Centrino stuff (the ipw2200 stuff) was a HUGE FAQ at LinuxWorld, last year. I think a lot of people have trouble with that. Send me an email directly, and we'll talk about it. (I have a hard time keeping up with the fedora-list. :-))
What I *wish* I had was a central link where I could just point people for drivers, for the http://www.fedorafaq.org/#drivers question.
-Max
On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 09:30, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 12:18 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
I can see why it isn't so popular...
Hahahaha... just to let you know, I have about 150,000 impressions a month on all the translations of fedorafaq.org, averaging out to usually 80,000 unique visitors a month on the English version alone.
I do try to keep the FAQ updated. If you have anything that you feel like should be on there, and it isn't, please send me an email! I have a whole section of the site on how to contribute:
You shouldn't have to ask permission to contribute, and with a wiki you don't any more than on a mailing list. Is there any chance you could add a wiki section? I happen to like twiki, but you probably don't need any of the special features.
A FAQ for this mailing list would obviously need to answer the "where's the web/nntp interface" question....
Hi all,
For those who expressed an interest in reading this list via nntp, you can already do it!
Server: news.gmane.org Group: gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
Marc
Marc D. Field wrote:
Hi all,
For those who expressed an interest in reading this list via nntp, you can already do it!
Server: news.gmane.org Group: gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
Marc
Actually, it seems that there's already access available to this list by pretty much any method one can choose! Now, it's just a matter of taste :-)
Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 15:04 -0600, akonstam@trinity.edu wrote:
I don't know where is opposition to the list is coming from but I see no real problem with the list as it exists.
Good point, and one I would like to echo. This list *can* continue as it is. It is not actively causing harm to the community.
Then again, it could be improved:
- Better searching of archives
- More flexible ways to access its content
- Greater ease for newbies in learning its use
- Greater ease for experts in wading through 8,000 messages/month trying to find questions to answer
- Greater control over malware
Probably a few more I've missed off the top of my head. But moving from the mailing list to web fora is not going to improve anything, and will certainly cause some harm.
- I'm nearly the most-prolific poster on Piper Chat
(www.piperchat.com) and it watches to see whether there's a reply to a conversation in which I participate. That's nice for newbies. However, actively trying to find new things that might be of interest to me entails a daily visit to the site, trawling the various areas to see if something was posted. Takes a good five minutes of my time, and that's on a board that gets 5-10 messages a day! Bleagh.
If fedora-list were only fedora-webfora, I would find it so difficult and so time-consuming to help others that my current activity level would be severely curtailed. I can go through a day's posts in fedora- list within five to ten minutes... I cannot do that with web fora.
Without people who want to help others, or with any marked reduction in those people, the Fedora community suffers grievous harm.
- Adding independent web fora to the mailing list (remember, Warren
said fedora-list would not close) is a recipe for disaster. Some people would move to the web fora, some would stay on the mailing list, very few (almost none?) would monitor both, and you then have a fragmented community. And I'll bet you that most of the experts stay on the mailing list, leaving the web fora an empty shell that's not very useful to newbies since a neat interface is no substitute for content.
Let's find something that helps everyone, I say. So I repeat: let us move to NNTP as a *base* protocol, with news-to-mail and news-to-web gateways so that each person may choose whatever tool/interface they prefer. All those protocols, gateways, and interfaces already exist! No need to reinvent the wheel here.
If someone objects to NNTP, I am willing to listen. But please, let proposed solutions be those that ADD flexibility and robustness instead of removing it.
Cheers,
Wow, this thread is getting longer than the ones that prompted the original post!
Anyway, my preferences would be: NNTP (10 out of 10), keep the mailing list as is (9 out of 10) and web forum (1 out of 10).
-- David Liguori
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 01:18:42 -0600, Gustavo Seabra seabra@ksu.edu wrote:
Marc D. Field wrote:
Hi all,
For those who expressed an interest in reading this list via nntp, you can already do it!
Server: news.gmane.org Group: gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
Marc
Actually, it seems that there's already access available to this list by pretty much any method one can choose! Now, it's just a matter of taste :-)
This point seems to not be advertised very well. Perhaps RedHat simply need to list out all the options along side the mailing list. The big problem seems to be simply a lack of communication. We get duplicate posts because people sign up and don't search the archive. Some don't know the archives exist, all seem to find the archive difficult to search, some don't know the particular customs of the list etiquette, etc. Maybe RedHat should simply clean up what we already have instead trying to spin up another thing along side it to only possibly add to the confusion.
Jonathan
On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 11:53 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Is there any chance you could add a wiki section? I happen to like twiki, but you probably don't need any of the special features.
Hey Les! I've definitely thought about a wiki before. I think the best thing would be for somebody to start a wiki, perhaps a fedorawiki.org or something like that, and then I could link to it from the FAQ.
If anybody does start one, and it starts to be a really good source of information, let me know and I'll definitely link to it! :-)
-Max
On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 23:34:29 -0800, Max Kanat-Alexander max_list@fedorafaq.org wrote:
On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 11:53 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/contribute/Is there any chance you could add a wiki section? I happen to like twiki, but you probably don't need any of the special features.
Hey Les! I've definitely thought about a wiki before. I think the bestthing would be for somebody to start a wiki, perhaps a fedorawiki.org or something like that, and then I could link to it from the FAQ.
If anybody does start one, and it starts to be a really good source ofinformation, let me know and I'll definitely link to it! :-)
-Max
I agreed. but I think make a page that can perform search function to get help which the solution is /are get from this mailing list. The page of http://www.fedorafaq.org/contribute/ is a good start and hope it have more information.
Wong Kwok Hon
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