[Mageia-discuss] Mageia review with bad experience

[TJ]

On 10/14/2011 02:59 AM, Pierre Jarillon wrote:
> Le lundi 10 octobre 2011 23:29:08, Michael Scherer a écrit :
>> With the problem of having experienced people leaving, because "mandrake
>> is a distribution for newbie, i am not a newbie, therefor, mandrake is
>> not for me". This surely helped debian or fedora to get contributers.
>
> IMO, there is another reason, a lack of documentation.
> When something goes wrong, it is very difficult to understand how it should
> work.
> Some examples:
> - printing
> - video configuration
> - sound
> - security
> I saw people using chmod but it was back in the previous state. Those people
> ignore msec and MCC.
> - network : Generally, network configuration works perfectly but when
> something wrong happens it is now rather complicated to do something.
>
> Mageia (and Mandriva) are more and more complicated. Thus, the number of
> people able to debug and make a patch continuously decreases.
> An accurate documentation is necessary.
>
I'd second that. I've been stumbling around Linux since 2002, making 
conclusions on how things work based on my own observations, only to 
later learn that I was completely, utterly wrong. I have been told that 
I should learn this or study that, but quite frankly I do not have the 
time - or the inclination - to do so.

My skill set no longer includes the necessary coding skills to do 
debugging or write patches in modern systems, and at my age that's not 
likely to change. But it would be nice to have at least some 
documentation on how things work, so that I could make the simple 
configuration adjustments that I need to make to do the things I want to 
do without maneuvering through a maze of dead ends and false paths. I'm 
thinking of something deeper than a newbie-type "Getting To Know Mageia" 
manual, yet less than a developer's programming manual.

The trouble is, I was once a programmer myself, for ancient systems in 
ancient languages no longer used much, and I know that most programmers 
hate writing documentation. Programmers are human, too. They want to do 
the fun stuff. And when you aren't required to do it by force of losing 
your job, you tend avoid the stuff that isn't fun to do.

TJ