At 2:59 PM -0500 5/6/2000, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
[...]
>Making the FAQ more prominent from within INSTALL is the best way to
>get it noticed... something draconian about checking there before
>asking questions that might already have been answered at the
>beginning of the file would likely be enough.
[...]

If there's one thing I've learned from my Linux/Mac68k hacking, it's that
even if you tattoo it on the insides of their eyelids, newbies will never
read the FAQ.

It probably comes from the two audiences that Mac68k *nix'en seem to
attract, which is long-time mac users who want to play with *nix on an old
box, and long-time PC *nix users who come across an old mac one way or
another.

The long-time mac users expect everything to 'just work' and have a
consistient user interface, such as MacOS provides, and thus they expect
not to have a need to read any of the documentation.

The long-time PC *nix users don't realize that while there may be hundreds
of thousands of programmers worldwide working on open source products, very
few of them do so on 68k macs, and thus things tend not to work quite as
smoothly. Add to that the fact that 68k macs were certainly not designed to
run a modern OS, and you get grumpy and dissapointed users.


Combine both those two, and you get a lot of faq-posts about this and that
not working, not being able to figure something out, or just general
bitterness. (if you want to see real bitterness, check out Jonathan Blank's
posts to the Linux/m68k list. jeez.)

Ah well...


Cheers - Tony :)


--
Tony Mantler       Renaissance Nerd Extraordinaire     nicoya@apia.dhs.org
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada                     http://nicoya.feline.pp.se/