Re: My take on the send-pr issue

["Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh%freefall.cdrom.com@localhost>]

I've hesitated to comment on this up to now, but as someone who's very
*BSD user oriented (as opposed to hacker oriented) and who actually
sits on a tech support line and answers FreeBSD support questions, I
have to say that the entire argument looks rather unnecessary.

send-pr will be used by those smart enough to both find it and fill
out the form - that's fine, and I see no reason to discourage such
people (after all, if someone WANTS to switch themselves out of your
tech support load, do you really want to fight them?).  The rest
aren't going to be able to deal with something even remotely as
sophisticated as send-pr, to say nothing of GNATS.  From my
perspective of sitting on a 1-800 tech support number, I believe I can
say with some authority that a very large majority of the world's
population is composed of utter morons.  The people at whom product
warnings stickers labeled "WARNING: DO NOT STICK THIS PRODUCT UP YOUR
NOSE!  YOU WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTEE!" are squarely aimed.  Such people,
and we must assume them to be the majority if we are to provide truly
effective across-the-board support, need more hand-holding than any of
the traditional mechanisms are currently providing.

So I would save my energy arguing over send-pr and invest it instead
in creating the kind of framework that completely masks its presence.
People can stumble over all sorts of fatal things in *BSD, so moving
send-pr would no more effective than removing `rm' in protecting
users.  Taking it from that angle buys you nothing.  What buys you
something is to write a command called 'HELP!' and point people at it
in the first paragraph of all your documentation.  One of the items on
your big "HELP" menu can then be "send bug report".  You do it right
and people won't even bother looking further, and send-pr can reside
in quiet obscurity at its current location.  It's not like `send-pr'
is even something that Joe Sixpack is likely to type inadvertantly!
If it were named 'help' or '?' then I'd be more inclined to take this
whole argument seriously.

                                        Jordan