Re: [gnome-love] Things that make you go "What in the world is That?!?"

[Elijah Newren <newren math utah edu>]

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 01:13, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> (Note that the first two are linked from the gnome-love wiki page and
> the third should be added...
agreed...I'll add it in a minute.

>  looking a *bit* harder for information is
> part of the open source game :)

This is true right now, but it *really* sucks.  Once upon a time, to
install linux you had to know how to compile your own kernel, and would
need to know your hardware in detail.  That was bad and kept people from
using linux.  I still feel like I sometimes like Google is an
indispensable tool for some simple tasks like using a usb keychain. 
That sucks.  I think, as a whole, we realize that requiring end users of
software to do these big tasks is bad for wide adoption, but I really
feel that as a community we haven't yet grasped the same concept for
developer documentation.

Just to give an example, automatic code-generation by glade is
discouraged.   I heard and learned that at some point, yet virtually
every tutorial I was able to find that covers glade covers automatic
code-generation and either completely ignores libglade or mentions it in
passing.  Libglade tutorials were few and far between, and never covered
glade itself.  So, using glade & libglade properly meant gathering
information from very different tutorials and trying to mold them
together yourself.  Not a good thing to require of beginners, IMO. 
There's several more examples too...

Ok, time for me to end this rant.


Elijah