> Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:21:16 -0500
    > From: "Tom E. Craddock Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

    > Jens Baumeister wrote:
    > > Hi,
    > > 
    > > since the LiveTV changes seem to lead to questions again and again
    > > (and sometimes to flamewars), I volunteer to write an FAQ about it.
    > > 
    > > However, while I do know how things are currently working, I'm not
    > > 100% sure about the planned state for the 0.19 release. (Esp. from the
    > > user perspective: What setting are planned, etc.) I'd be grateful for
    > > any pointers to resources (bug tickets, list threads)  I can mine for
    > > further information.
    > > 
    > > That way, we'd have a single place to point people to when the
    > > question comes up again.
    > > 
    > > Jens

    > You mean besides the archives at gossamer-threads for the -users, -dev, 
    > and -commit lists?

[Someone's volunteering to make the documentation better, and you're
actively trying to discourage him?  Why?  Not to mention that this
sort of documentation has to be written -sometime- as part of a user
manual, right?  Presumably the end state is for the way LiveTV
operates to be documented somewhere, the proposed FAQ would be
a good start at getting that written.]

In any event---yes, in addition to the archives.  Searching archives
is a poor substitute for organized information in a central place.
The archives are huge (2400 messages/month! 14 meg/month!); poorly
organized (threads often wander); and invariably contain large amounts
of outdated information---by definition, most of it is old.  Further,
it's never clear from any given message whether some later message
might obsolete it---and it's often hard to tell, since it's very hard
to prove a negative, e.g., that there -isn't- some other message/
thread that, if only you'd used a slightly different search term,
you'd have found.  People who don't also subscribe to all the lists
may not know that there's been a discussion about something, hence
won't know if they've used the wrong search term and failed to find it.

Finally, even if you succeed in all that, searching through archives
is very time consuming compared to just reading a web page---and the
web page could have author(s) and a modification-date and a "here are
exactly the versions we're talking about and not these other versions
over here" and all sorts of other contextual data that would make
using the information a whole lot easier.  If information changes
that obsoletes a wiki page, it's likely someone will update it.
If an old thread gets obsoleted, it will -never- get updated, but
it won't be obvious where the new information is.

And regardless of whether you think that the information is
theoretically available in the archives, it clearly isn't available
enough in practice, or we wouldn't have exactly the problem that Jens
is trying to solve---namely that the list is full of people asking the
same questions about LiveTV over and over.  That stuff is clearly
already in the archives, and clearly not being found.  He's proposing
to save everybody a lot of time (the questioners, the answerers, those
who read the list and have to wade past the same questions a lot), and
I'd think that anyone who's offering to do this should be showered
with candy and flowers, not made to justify his actions for a
situation that's obviously chewing up peoples' time and leading
to flamewars and hard feelings.
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