On September 22, 2003 07:40 pm, yankl wrote: >vicously clear cuts a whole forest of words<
> > I do not think that we need to embrace every person who like to switch to > linux. (I see the stones flying in my direction but bare with me for a > second) The *NIX OS is designed for responsible people, are we agree on > this? Of course we can. :-) In fact any OS should be designed for responsinle persons. The fact is that our favourite whipping boy is designed that way too, then sold as an OS for morons. You get what you market to. :-) > > NT-2000-XP could be as good as *NIX (I see more stones flying in my > direction) but it have two major flows. First, every user is Administrator > in the system.Second, its make operation easy by hiding most of the > backstage operation from user. Why? Because it is easy OS, i.e., by doing > this OS writer eliminate situation where user would need to know underbelly > of the system. The idea is that you do not need to know how staff ranning. > In opposite in *NIX to survive one need to know how things working and why > they working like this. Users who like to run easy OS and like to switch to > *NIX will force us to come to the same situation where by default we will > try to make a user life as easy as it can be. I see that trend in some kde > tools. For example do you know where is settings for mime types association > is? Now tell me where is a file where this settings stored and what > command is responsible for update of this settings? One Russian general sad > that if it is difficult in training, it will be easy in a battle. So unless > it is emergency the response RFTM <u>could</> be a good one. Okay, I'm gonna start flogging this dead horse again. Let's go back a bit to where the man pages actually came from and the purpose they served and largely continue to serve. In the early NIX world where the folks hacking away on the system were C programmers talking to C programmers they came up with this neat system to communicate with each other. It was called manuals or man pages. Initially they were nothing more than slighlty edited copies of code comments explaining a module or package complete with a list of options. While they've come a very small way since then in that they are no longer just a rehash of code commentary the purpose is still the same. It may not be C programmers talking to C programmers any more it's more likely to be shell programmers talking to each other. It's still dense, it says very little that is of any help to a newbie and is likely to lead to more confusion that it is to a solution. And it ain't just Windows users that will be running for the hills. They'll be Mac users, Amiga users and just plain folk who haven't had their own desktop/laptop before. Hell, the man pages are intimidating to university students who specialize in NIX. They serve an invaluable purpose, as noted above, but they were never intended or written as teaching tools to people who are looking at Mandrake and scratching their heads about how to do something. > > By the chance -k switch in man is key word switch. To find the man pages > related to some word. I've made dinner and washed up waiting on that one :-) While not a shot at you, yankl, there are things people who advocate man pages as a teaching/learning document need to remember. The most important thing is that adults don't learn that way. Present an adult with an impetetrable wall, which is how man pages and, sadly, the majority of HOWTOS, appear and they will try to work through it for a while then wonder what the blazes and I doing here and go out and get you know what from a certain Mr Gates cause everyone tells them the lie that it's easy. Adults need to feel, fairly quickly, that they've accomplished something. And documentation should be written to allow that. For example, Joe and Jane Public have a spanking new Mandrake system with, what they discover, is a web server called Apache on it. Great, says Jane, I want to put some stuff up there just for your family. Documents on Apache should show Jane, and Joe if he can pull himself away from his favourite beverage and the football match, how to do that in quick order. We'll pretend such documentation exists. (It doesn't, believe me.) Jane looks at her creation and smiles. Now she's ready to delve more deeply into the mysteries of .htaccess and a whole bunch of other stuff that she didn't know existed. She's also ready to poke around into the firewall because someone suggested that turning off port 80 access incoming from the internet would be a very good idea. She quickly finds documentation on shorewall and webmin that help her do this. (This currently does not exist. It used to but the maintainer of shorewall has deleted it.) Now she's ready to dig into the HOWTOS and the man pages. She's done something, she'd proud of it and wants to learn more. She knows, and so does Joe, that it can be done. Now they want to do it better. In the process they've learned some of the lingo and apache-speak and shorewall-speak to allow them to make sense of it. This is how adults learn. And this is how I teach them and have done so for 15 years. Hook em first then throw the dense stuff at them. This is how you and I learn, too. At the moment I deeply regret not having the time to come up with an example of this. I am, however, considering it if for no other reason than to prevent people from making the same mistakes that I have with respect to setting things up..not understanding the interoperabilty of it all..and ending up with a dead system as a result. Incidentally, man pages do not go into interoperability of functions and packages and neither do HOWTOS. They assume people know. People, documenters in particular, who assume things are themselves a creature whose name is the first three letters of that word. Nothing in computing operates in a vaccuum. Everything I do, particularly in NIX, affects other things. Get them up and running first. Give them a sense of accomplishment. THEN and only then tell them to RTFM. :-) ttfn John (who keeps hoping that by flogging this dead horse it will get up and win the Triple Crown)
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