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#! rnews 5792 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!newshost.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!vic.news.telstra.net!news.mira.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: God Damn partition crap! Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 11:13:43 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 87 Message-ID: <31559EE7.59E2B600@FreeBSD.org> References: <4hqav8$kmo@nntp.interaccess.com> <3140F2B6.41C67EA6@freebsd.org> <4i1qp4$bmj@nntp5.u.washington.edu> <4i50q6$64i@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4i727m$1hl@nntp5.u.washington.edu> <4j0mhb$r6i@calypso.bns.com.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) To: Michael Talbot-Wilson <mike@calypso.bns.com.au> Michael Talbot-Wilson wrote: > But when I see people writing about how they are too busy writing > code to write documentation for the software they have published, > when I contempate the waste of time when perhaps 100 or 1000 people > (including me) spend 6 weeks each attempting to discover what the > core team members and seasoned BSD hackers know already, how to do > a thing that should only take a few minutes, any such gratitude > disappears. In their view their time is important, and the time > of all others, in their opinion lesser mortals, lamers, is unimportant. > They are wrong. Sigh. I should know better than to even answer this since the discussion has clearly degenerated into the emotional rather than the intellectual, and I have very little time to argue with people who have already formed their opinions and are now simply interested in arguing. What Joerg was trying to say, if you're willing to read the entire text of the message and look past a couple of points which could probably be easily taken as inflammatory if not tempered by the message contained in the rest of the text, is that people are simply busy. Very busy. It's not a question of what's important or what's not, it's a question of what's _achievable_ and what's not. We could be idealists here and say "yes, documentation is utterly important" and "proper hand-holding is utterly important" and "technical correctness is utterly important" but after you've covered about 10 things that are "utterly important" (each and every one of which IS utterly important!) you're left with a whole pile of work and no clear picture of how to order it. Most volunteers here, and they are _volunteers_, also have full-time jobs and such to do and they opt for what's most interesting to them when faced with such a conundrum - who can blame them? I don't speak for everyone of course, but it's a very common scenario among our developers that they're essentially dragging themselves back to the terminal after a full day at some thankless task to work another 3-4 hours on FreeBSD when what they'd really like to do is watch a little TV and go to sleep. If, given this, they choose to then take the most desirable task off the list of possible tasks and actually dare to enjoy themselves a little bit after a hard day, who am I to argue? I'd *love* for some people to do more docs work, but I also know that it's not the most enticing work in the world and so I hold my breath. Perhaps some day a few tech writers who love their work will volunteer for this project, but until now we've been forced to make due with various scraps and heroic bursts of effort from hideously overworked grad students like John Fieber. > I hope I have misunderstood Jorg Wunsch where he seems to say, and > say sarcastically, that it is unnecessary for the FreeBSD team to > make available some simple means of installing a partition (in lieu > of documentation) because they themselves already know how to do it. You have misunderstood Joerg Wunsch. It's not in any way perceived as unnecessary, it's just a question of finding someone to do the work. I have no money to pay people to do things, so I must settle for them doing what they care to do. Very occasionally I manage to brow-beat someone into doing something they'd really rather not, or general peer-pressure gets someone to put in overtime to fix a problem or shortcoming that is really bothering people, but too much of either and you're faced with a sudden lack of volunteers and the project dies. You can't force people to do this stuff. I myself do a lot of the crappy work (install tools, release engineering) which I personally happen to _loath_, but that's because I'm one of the very few people lucky enough to be able to do this stuff full-time and so feel that I should take up the slack in areas that most people don't derive a lot of satisfaction from. > documented, if you know where to look. Well, the disklabel man page > is one place to look, and it is a disgrace. More than that, the So fix it or pay me some money so that I might hire someone else to fix it. Or decide that you've neither time, skill nor money and run another OS. Believe me, this latter choice won't bother us in the slightest and if FreeBSD doesn't suit your needs or you're unwilling to personally put in the effort to fill in whatever percentage falls short, then GO! Run whatever suits you best and leave our poor developers alone! We'll be more than happy to wave goodbye from the dock. For those who ARE willing to meet us halfway and contribute what they can, being patient with our shortcomings when they can't, we'll certainly continue to work our asses off to make you happy as we have for the last 3 years now. It's a two-way street, folks! -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project