[plug] Announcement

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 09:37 +0800, Chris Griffin wrote:
> Disappointed to see you go Arie.

Indeed, though frankly I'm puzzled as to why you feel the need to leave
the list. All I've seen is a disagreement - sometimes a bit of a heated
one, admittedly, but nothing nasty by any stretch, and despite all the
noise the more useful discussion on the list has hardly ground to a
halt.

Then again, you cite various off-list mails, so I guess there's a lot
going on here we're not seeing.

> I think a few of the rest of you need
> to grow up and get out of your Debian clique. If, as someone said, most
> of you are Debian based and hence not really interested in answering
> queries on other distros, then call yourself DUG and stop trying to
> pretend you are having  membership drives advertising help for
> "LINUX", when all you are really interested in is "numbers and DUG".

Personally, I think that's missing the point. PLUG is a Linux user's
group... pretty much by definition, the distribution of knowledge and
preferences of the group is the choice of the members. If many of the
highly skilled users who choose to spend *their* *time* trying to help
people out here use Debian, it hardly seems reasonable to demand that
they change OS so that they're better able to answer distro-specific
questions from others. Especially when many answers apply equally well
to any distro anyway, and when most of the Debian folks tend to note
that their answer applies to Debian-based systems where appropriate.

I should also note that not everybody here uses Debian, or exclusively
Debian, by any stretch. There's also the small matter of the Debian-
based Ubuntu and its increasing popularity even with relatively new
users.

I'm willing to accept there are issues here, though I don't view them as
being of quite the same magnitude as others seem to. I don't think the
fact that a lot of the active list members choose to use Debian is one
of them.

Just for the record, I use RH FC3 at home, Debian at work.

> I think you need to look at why so many of us answered off-list to
> Arie, it is because we feared the backlash from YOU and being snubbed
> and not getting any responses when we made requests for help.

I'd like to hope nobody is holding any grudges over this discussion,
certainly not against someone who, like you, is just politely and
reasonably expressing an opinion.

> Well,
> that's where I have been, but the time comes when you need to stand up
> and be counted, so what the heck.
> I suppose this will get me blackballed too.

Well, I certainly hope not.

I will, however, make the same request of you that I have of all the
others who've expressed concern about the "newbie-friendlyness" of the
list: Please start helping answering questions, rather than just asking
others to do things differently. A very quick look at my archive shows
mostly help requests by you and follow ups to them.

If you've been answering help requests off list, then thanks for doing
so, and consider the above grumble widthdrawn. However, if you do post
off-list, then I think it might be best to reply on-list by preference
so others can see that a question has been addressed, can see your
answers, and so that your answers get in the list archives.

And yes, obviously you'll continue to receive my incomprehensible,
useless, and technobabble filled posts when I think I might be able to
help out. Ah, yes, "greek," I believe that was it.

"Η σελίδα που ζητήσατε δεν βρέθηκε. Μπορεί να δώσατε λάθος την διεύθυνση
(url), ή να έχει μετακινηθεί η συγκεκριμένη σελίδα. Σε κάθε περίπτωση,
μπορείτε να βρείτε αυτό που ψάχνετε από το παρακάτω."

I do believe that is greek. (I think it's also a 404, but anyway...)

-- 
Craig Ringer