It seems there is a lot of personal knowledge locked up in a vast amount of
heads just here on this list. Significant trivia that just passes day in and
day out you can't really concentrate on all the postings because they don't
immediately concern you but later, like a year from now, you'll be like:
"hey, I'd like to change my X cursors." Then you have to either wade
through all your email or web archives searching for that final posting that
resolves the "how-to" problem. HOW-TOs are great; however, a little rought
to digest sometimes and but not always helpful.
It seems like by leveraging perl or python and the rpmfind.net mechanism we
could build an infrastructure to capture all this know-how and create "guru"
utilities that formally gather and try all the diagnostics gleaned from
input from the collective consciouness within the Linux community and the
HOW-TOs and etc. This would probably be a monumental undertaking, but it
seems like that is what Linux is all about. Basically, if we could automate
(kind of like the ./configure process) the "did you check this and did you
try this" method of trouble shooting with some sort of feed back loop
something very innovative could be created. This would be taking the HOW-TO
one step further.
I would really like to try to do something this. However, I have zero time
and zero experience with perl/python - but if anyone else thinks this is
interesting and would like to talk about how this might be done I'd like to
persue this a little more. Maybe there is something like this already...
