Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > Ritesh Raj Sarraf writes ("Re: contacting Debian is too easy to get wrong"):
>> When a user asks for a question, most usually end up on a web >> forum. Developers mostly prefer monitoring hand-picked mailing lists >> only. That's where the disconnect is, in my opinion. >> What we need is to relate these interfaces to one another. > I think the problem with user questions is even worse than that. > Many developers don't actually want to spend much (or any) time > answering user questions. Partly for bad reasons; but also for the > very good reason that it doesn't scale. I was about to follow up to make this point, but Ian beat me to it. When I had lots of time to spend on Debian, I would occasionally get some satisfaction out of helping a user debug some sort of general issue with Debian on their system, or thinking through an odd use case for a package to find some solution, but that sort of thing usually takes quite a lot of time and back and forth, and it's often not high-leverage in the sense that an equal amount of time put into packaging a new upstream release or fixing a known bug will improve more things for more people. As I've had to cut back on the number of hours I spend on Debian, I gravitate towards higher-leverage activities. At this point, I just don't have time to read and understand most user questions, let alone help with them, so it's not so much that I prefer forums that use a different format than users prefer as it is that I prefer forums that don't have user questions. :| -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>