SEUL: Who to whine to

[David Cary <d.cary@ieee.org>]

Who to whine to:

>From: jfm2@club-internet.fr
>To: seul-project@seul.org
>Subject: SEUL: Re: Resignation as seul-install leader
...
>Third: When you see another distribution do not look at it trying to
>find than your distro is better or if something is broken but what are
>the ideas in it.

Hear, hear.
When you look at software, among other things you will *always* see both
these things:

 * Clever ideas that work really, really nicely. I take these ideas and try
to make sure my programs work at least that well; and I try to tell
everyone who would be interested in that sort of thing about this cool
software.

 * inconsistencies, difficulties, and bugs. Don't ignore these, but
*please* try to give this information to people who some chance of fixing
it. Give them some constructive criticism, a scenario showing the Better
Way.

I find it frustrating to read messages ranting and whining about something
that not only do I not have a clue how to fix, but I suspect no one else on
the list does, either.

Now, if the user can't figure out who to contact, or if the author of the
software doesn't want to maintain it any more, well, that's different.

I also find it frustrating when I learn, often secondhand, that someone has
been struggling for weeks to do something with some program I wrote. If
only someone had told me weeks ago that there was a problem, I could have
at least fixed the documentation and immediately given that to them.

--
+ David Cary "mailto:d.cary@ieee.org" "http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/"
| Future Tech, Unknowns, PCMCIA, digital hologram, <*> O-