[Foresight-i18n] Re: [Foresight-devel] Localisation and Documentation

[Thilo Pfennig]

I think one good rule I like to suggest is to try to do small things
which can have a great effect. Some things need a lot of work - but
sometimes very small things can have an enormous benefit. I did not
really invested much time into the wiki pages for debian and rpm users
 but I got a lot of positive feedback. Whcih means people are
satisfied if they find answers to their questions - no matter how much
time and efforts we invest.

So what I suggest is nothing more than pure economics: get more out of
what you do then what you invested.

Foesight has to keep its focus on its target users. If we say they are
the very simple users than our documentation and environment should
reflect that. But then again - something like rescue mode is not what
a simple user could handle. I think we have different views of what
Foresight should be now - but thats not important - I think only
important thing is that we need to be consequent in the directions. So
if Ken has a vision and he likes to lead to this goal this is good. We
then only need to make concrete long term or short term goals out of
this. This can also eman that we set some goals for the next 4 weeks
that are completely different to where we want to be in 2 years from
now. But i see this as a way: Sometimes you have to go west around a
mountain when you really want to go north. its not always the most
efficient way to go straight.

Or another view: Foresight has and will have its flaws. We just need
to identify them and find strategies or workarounds to deal with them.
And we need to tell the users. So we had this problem with the
Foresigth system manager which was kind of the official system manager
but updates did not work for many if not most users. This is a bad
situation which one can solve by providing documentation on hwo to do
updates really. The bad thing is if we say: This is the way and it
does not work - then people will blame us or Foresight or Linux
althogether for failures. I think Foresight is in the nice situation
for not beeing too popular yet - while it still has some more serious
issues. We should be prepared to deal with lots of more users that
then migth all have the same problems. Currently the main problem
seems to be the switch from devide naming in new kernel. I would say
it might have been not a lucky decision to switch the kernel so close
to a new release withoput having the time to test this more
thoroughly. But I am not a kernel guy - but I did not see this coming
and also was not involved in any decisions. I try my best to help
people who still have problems with that but it seems that the
documentation and help we provide is often not sufficient to solve
these problems. And I currently really dont know what to recommend to
those people.

My wish would be to update kernels on GNOMes development releases so
that we would have a 2.19 test install DVD and therefore could
indetnify problems. I got stuck with udpating shortly before 1.4
release but luckily I knew how to go into rescue mode and got a hint
that the naming had changed. And I was lucky that my system was nice
to me and worked after some minor fixes. But I think for many people
who might have switched from Windows those problems would mean that
they remove Foresight linux completely as only maybe maximum of 1-2 %
of all people will  ever use IRC or will search via web what the root
cause might be. "Just works" also means that it either works or not.
Of not - no solution - only for hackers or advanced users like we are
and those gentoo guys ;-) .

I like what the Ubuntu guys are doing - let the teams report back on
statuses on  a regular basis. This way there is a chance to collect
all information on critical progress.


Thilo