Re: My first impression and goodbye

["James M. Cape" <jcape jcinteractive com>]

Philippe Moutarlier wrote:
> 
> May I just add some personnal comments about this thread and its starting point.
> 
> I read the starting message, and I felt very sorry for the guy writting it.
> I know how to program. I know how to compile and how to debug. I use mostly basic shell, emacs
> and gnus. And sometime, I ask myself : do I really need Gnome ? Well, maybe not. In some
> case, I definitely would say no (I would not exchange gnus against balsa, for example)
> 
> But it's cool ! Looks great, and maybe one day, some people who do not have my knowledge
> will be able to use it easily too. Peolple who do not know how to setup gnus will appreciate Balsa a lot and this is good. People who do not know and don't want to run a debugger on a third party software for example. I know a lot of them ...
> 
> Now, how can some people both
> 
> - scare people away by answering a little bit rudely to their frustration instead of making them fell a little bit more comfortable

Ok, so why doesn't somebody make me feel more comfortable? I think I've
helped more than enough people over the course of 4 years of geekdom to
qualify for a break.

I answered "rudely" (tersely, perhaps) because his message wasn't
helpful. It wasn't:

"I'm having some trouble in these areas, what should I do to fix them?"

or:

"I'm getting a crash with Gmc on Linux 2.0.36 w/ Glibc 2.0.7 & Gcc 2.7.2
when I try to double click an icon, gdb says..."

it was:

"Great. It doesn't work. The file manager core dumps. There aren't any
icons. I'm not going to even try Gnome again until 2.0."

The reason why I told the original poster to post back with some helpful
information is to prevent the core Gnome developers from getting as
burnt out as the core WM developers.

> - feel "threatened" that those people are actually going to try something which will make feel better

I don't feel "threatened" that the person in question might try KDE, I
feel frustrated that people still resort to *that* sort of whining to
get their way. I never liked it, and as a quasi-regular on the list, I
don't like it when people post messages that offer no semblance of a bug
report, and won't stick around to see it through.

> I that what we want to get with Gnome ?? Don't we want to get "unexperimented" users to come to it ?

Yes, but if they are having problems, they should at least give the
developers useful information.

> Look at how Miguel answers to people frustration. Always nice and useful. And I think this is the way to go (IMHO)
> 
> Philippe

I notice that Miguel also only answers credible reports and problems --
he didn't reply to the original message.

    Jim Cape
    http://www.jcinteractive.com

    "All animals are equal, some animals
     are more equal than others."
         -- George Orwell, Animal Farm