Subject: Re: "shouted down", "shot down", apologies
From: Warren Young <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 16:51:26 -0600

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> I have been concerned by two recent messages where people have felt
> that their ideas have been "shouted down" or "shot down".
> 
> That bothers me.  It bothers me because I assume that most, if not
> all of the negative perception undoubtedly came from me.

You have to realize that no-one can feel shot down by mere words if they
don't respect the person doing the shooting.  You are arguably Cygwin's
Linus -- Linus doesn't "make" Linux any more than you "make" Cygwin, yet
your central role in maintaining the core gives your opinions a certain
weight.  I and others respect that, so that if you think a thing should
not be done, we are likely to go along with your view.  We might not be
happy with it, but we are more interested in keeping you happy than in
upsetting the apple cart to our own ends.  This is one of the forces
that binds Open Source projects together, and we shouldn't try to
second-guess it; we just need to understand and wield this force to good
ends.

On the FAQ issue, Larry Hall and I have had a private email exchange
that may bring some resolution to this issue.  Watch the list for
details in the next few days.

Just so you know, I'm not all that upset or bitter, just disappointed
that I was unable to change any minds.  After deciding that I was just
going to let the status remain quo (so to speak :) ) I only piped back
up on this issue because I thought I knew what the answer was going to
be.  If I was wrong, that's fine, too, because I do think something
should be done about the current way of distributing answers to newbies.

> So, filling the FAQ with non-frequently asked questions does not seem like
> the way to go to me.  It seems like it will make the FAQ harder to navigate
> and will make it easier for people to miss things.

Consider navigating the world: one does not try to bring along a single
map to do this.

If you were going to visit a friend in Jakarta, you might first find it
on a globe, then set out in that general direction.  Once you got in the
vicinity, you might pick up a country map, to show you major roads you
could take to get to the city.  Then when you reach the city, you might
pick up a street map to find your friend's house.

My point is that easy navigation is about hierarchical organization. 
The world is a mondo-huge place, but it's still possible to find
relatively small things like particular houses.

The moral: large Q&A sources are fine, if organized properly.

> Updating the documentation *does* make sense to me.

That's all we're really disagreeing on: the organization of the "help me
fix Cygwin" document, and what it shall be called.  I started off
calling it a FAQ, but if that term is distasteful, that's fine.  Let's
just _do_ something and let the name follow.

> Please reorient your thinking from "This is what they should do" to
> "This is what I can do".

Let us call my proposal of a few months ago the "bloated FAQ" idea. 
Would you care to speculate about what would have happened if I had
decided to go ahead and make my own bloated FAQ?  Let's say it had a lot
of good material, that it was easy to navigate, etc., but that it was
hosted on my site, not an official Cygwin publication.  I am curious
what the reaction would have been.

> And, I also enjoy running a project like Cygwin.  I think that the net
> release of Cygwin has improved dramatically in the last couple of years.

Without a doubt.  There will always be something that isn't "right" yet,
and as Cygwin grows there will be more and more newbies.  This is why it
makes sense to start making more newbie documentation at this time. 
Obviously you're a coder and with respect to Cygwin I'm mostly a
technical writer, so maybe I should have just started the new "help me
fix Cygwin" document instead of just proposing it.

> That is because I've lobbied for changes inside of Red Hat and solicited
> active maintainers outside of Red Hat.  And, I've encouraged the
> development of the cygwin installer.

...and you now allow "contrib" packages.  For the longest time, Cygwin
was just a GNU environment for Windows.  These days, I think of Cygwin
as "Linux for Windows", what with all the new packages attached to it.

Which, by the way, leads me back to another proposal I've made that
never went anywhere: a setup.exe option allowing a minimal Cygwin
install.  This one requires code to be convincing, I know.

> I actually have a tendency to just see all of the negatives in cygwin.

I agree, Cygwin is a pretty crappy Linux distribution.  Still useful,
tho'.  :)

> (Although, I will probably still try to be "humorous" from time to
> time.  Be warned.)

Me, too.  See above.  :)

-- 
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m

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