On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 06:56:05PM +0200, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote: > What percentage of ppl respect the guidelines of the current > version? It's useless to write such things.
This is a rather specious argument. It's like saying. "Why don't we just not ship or update man pages. What percentage of users actually bother to read them?" Nobody can read them and follow them if you don't update and publish them. The current FAQ says that it is published to the list monthly. I don't remember the last time that was done. The current FAQ tells you to CC maintainers. Yet some Mandrake employees don't like that. Most of the FAQ has nothing to do with reporting bugs. It doesn't even ask people to report the version of the package they are reporting. And to get people to CC the right maintainer you're asking them to download and install rpmmon. Putting up a small webscript to get this information (as I've already done) would make it easier for people. The harder you make it for people to do it the "right" way the far less likely people are to do it the right way. You are very unlikely to get 100% compliance with anything you put up. But every person that you do get to do it "right" will ease your workload and make for a more relaxed environment on this list. Doesn't that make it worth the few minutes to fix the FAQ. Heck Leon Brooks actually wrote one that I'm sure you can borrow some of it from. To improve on the FAQ I'd do the following: a) Get rid of the information on how to submit packages. Put a small mention of it and point people to the RPM howto. Then make sure the rpm howto has the correct information on submitting them in it. Most users don't submit RPMs so the information is useless to them. b) Expand the explanation of how to make a good bug report. Explain how to find out the version of the package that someone is running. Explain not to reply to existing threads to start new ones. Explain how and where to search for duplicate bugs. c) Actually post it on the list and link to it from everywhere. Hell put it in the installer to give newbies something to read why they install. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org Never take no as an answer from someone who isn't authorized to say yes.
