how best to answer questions (was: RE: [mythtv-users] ringbuf1.nuv)
Cedar McKay
cedarmckay at mac.com
Mon Mar 24 18:05:05 UTC 2003
>
>
>Anyway, it seems to me that a project like MythTV attracts a higher
>percentage of Linux newbies than many others, because... well, because it's
>so cool! And, even though the documentation is pretty good & a lot of good
>effort has been expended on it, sometimes no amount of documentation is
>enough for a complete newbie (not necessarily kmallick2000) who is not
>familiar with fundamental *nix concepts, like paths & command line syntax.
>For instance, the documentation you pointed to shows an example for what to
>do if you want to change the default '/mnt/store' to '/var/video'. It would
>be easy for a real newbie to assume that if they don't want to change the
>default that they don't have to do anything, as there is no example for
>creating & setting the permissions on the '/mnt/store' directory.
>
I agree on this specific issue. Perhaps the docs should say something
like "most systems by default do not have a /mnt/store directory, you
must either create it or change the path to a directory that does exist".
However, in general I don't think it is rude to just point someone to
the manual. It might be a bit terse just to say "read the docs" but
supplying a link not only to the docs, but to the specific section that
will help the newbie shows that some consideration was put into the
question. Sure its short and direct, but the documentation is likely to
be more complete and correct than anything you could whip off in 15
seconds. For instance (not trying to pick on you) half of your two part
reply was wrong! /mnt/store and /mnt/store/ seem to be equivalent. So in
effect you have just made the newbies life more complicated by
introducing a red herring. Also as Jay showed yesterday, sometimes the
"two line reply" that you suggest seems to inexplicably infuriate the
newbie. What most people on the list would interpret as "brief but
helpful" or perhaps even "terse but to the point" was taken by him to be
an insult of some kind. This is especially strange since Edward's reply
was pretty long, polite and helpful. My point is that pointing to a
specific section of the documentation might be more helpful than any two
line reply and could avoid being seen as rudely terse.
cedar
More information about the mythtv-users
mailing list