On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 03:22:09AM +0200, Fabian Fagerholm wrote: > On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 02:23, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote: > > smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers' > > reference, web pages, etc, have you? > > Many operating systems have accompanying "certification" courses. These > serve the need of gathering a knowledgeable user base to run the systems > (MCSE, Sun cert, Cisco cert and so on). Why not try something similar, > but less formal and on-line, in debian?
IMHO, that comes from experience and not memorizing some manuals. IMHO, these certs are useless pieces of paper. You learn things by fixing bugs and reading how others fixed bugs.. > As for the web pages, there is room for improvement. You don't need to > comment on this; I know, I shouldn't complain and should do something > about it. I'll try to do that. IMHO, there is a _huge_ amount of servers that are not connected from main page... As of a week ago I could not find any links to qa.d.o, nm.d.o, buildd.d.o, etc.... It would be nice to have them at d.o/devel > Agreed to 99%. But I maintain that target audience is of importance for > coordination. There's a big difference in making, say, an email server > compared to a desktop system. The former may assume a certain level of > confidence in mail systems and computer systems in general - it's ok to > have debconf ask some complicated questions, or requiring the sysadmin > to edit configuration files. The latter would require quite a different > approach, and could not make the same assumptions about the user's > knowledge level. > It may be possible to make a one-size-fits-all system which can fulfill > the requirements of both the above examples, but we are already seeing > some specialization occur, for example with the debian multimedia > distribution. So target audience is important: how do you define "good > documentation" and "good packages" if you don't know who is going to > read the docs, and install the packages? There's more to it than having > no spelling errors and as few bugs as possible. IMHO, the questions asked by installation scripts are very clear.. For even a novice admin that is... After all, isn't admins or admin-wanna-bees what are installing a new system anyway? IMHO, I don't think that there is anything too cryptic being asked for desktop installation...
