On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 05:31:03PM -0700, lex ein wrote: >On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 10:47:57 +0200, Corinna Vinschen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>On Oct 5 16:00, David Campbell wrote: >>>I've read lots of web pages about how to set it up, and I believe I've >>>followed them, eg http://bumblebee.lcs.mit.edu/ssh2/ (for openssh to >>>openssh): >> >>WHY DON'T YOU READ THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION INSTEAD? [caps mine] >>OpenSSH comes with a lot of man pages. Then there's >>/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/openssh.README. Then you could have used >>ssh-host-config and ssh-user-config for the basic configuration. > >BECAUSE in the case of openssh(and others), the "official >documentation" is of little use to a new user: information is not >gathered, stored, or presented in a orderly, logical, or sensible >hierarchical manner, is not meaningfully cross-referenced, and is not >reasonably searchable. There's just no usable thread to pull to >unravel the mystery, either.
You know about the concept of a FAQ right? http://cygwin.com/faq/faq_3.html#SEC24 >Let's examine the steps a new user might pursue: What an amazingly hyperbolic response to an innocuous attempt by Corinna to help a user with problems. Even if you arguably read a hint of exasperation in her reply, this over-the-top response contained an order of magnitude more vitriol than anything you could squeeze from Corinna's message. And it wasn't even directed at you. I think I need another acronym besides YJS for this one. I can't think of a non-profane one right now. The state of cygwin documentation is directly related to the state of UNIX documentation. It is not a goal of the cygwin project to improve on the woeful state of UNIX/Linux documentation. The mechanism that we use in cygwin for documentation is the Linux model. There is undoubtedly much room for improvement in the current state of Cygwin (aka Linux/UNIX) documentation but it seems paradoxical to expect people who are excoriated for lacking the ability to understand the plight of the poor newbie to somehow improve things for them. Why is it that all of the people who still have the raw wounds from trying to set up ssh have not stepped forward to offer their contributions for improvement? It seems like we are again in another thread where people think that they are customers who can make suggestions to customer support rather than potential contributors who can think about donating their time to improving what they can. You can make a difference here by providing documentation or software to improve the situation. If you want to help, send some words to be incorporated into a document. Send a suggestion for how to do get "man -k" working. Offer a spiffy GUI hyperlinked program which will be easy-to-use for "newbies". Insulting maintainers ("dinosaur mentality", snidely criticizing documentation) is not a constructive way to get anything done, yet many people seemed to think this was actually a message containing good points rather than the standard hackneyed diatribe against the awful state of UNIX documentation. I *do* get that it is hard for some people to install ssh and other packages. I really do. I would love to Cygwin's usability improved. It seems that the people who have suffered through, and won out over, the usability problems have no desire to do anything to improve the situation and think that these tasks are only up to the cygwin developers. Oh well. Welcome to free software. -- Christopher Faylor spammer? -> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cygwin Co-Project Leader [EMAIL PROTECTED] TimeSys, Inc. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
