Actually there is a need for newbie level support, even for old dodgers
I'm happily bring up exim, fetchmail, cyrus and kmail. Nothing has changed much in software since 1962 - except that one can safely ignore IBM
BTW noticed that Suse 7.2 moved mail to port 12, trusted is now port 42
Newbies can e-mail me and track the telnet isp.com 110 debugging sessions with Ethereal sniffing away
A newbie HOWTO wouldn't be all that bad idea.
tedc
-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Hazel [
mailto:ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 1:49 AM
To: Chris Seberino
Cc: exim-users@???
Subject: Re: [Exim] criticism/comment about missing info in install docs
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Chris Seberino wrote:
> However, even if exim was only aimed at "serious" users
> and work environments, is it really wise to enforce
> RTFM by intentionally making things difficult?
Please. The _last_ thing I would ever attempt to do would be to
"intentionally make things difficult". The technical issues can be
complex - we have to try to make them easier and accessible, but it
ain't easy and, from a position of knowledge, it is hard when writing
documentation to avoid leaving out the one bit of crucial information
that the newbie doesn't have. That's why you really want the newbie to
write documentation, not the expert.
I've been around in this business for over 30 years. I've seen this all
before, many times. Way back in the early 1970's a proposal to give
beginner computer users immediate access to the interactive timesharing
system, before they had learned how to use the offline batch punch-card +
lineprinter system (and thereby gained some background knowledge) was
extremely controversial. But it went ahead, and world did not end.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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