[Xastir] openSUSE 10.2 CVS Success

[Lee Bengston]

On 7/6/07, Curt, WE7U <archer at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> Wiki's are great, I use them all the time.  However:  Our particular
> Wiki seems (to me) to be a bit difficult to find, particularly if
> you don't know it exists.


I don't know - a google search on xastir finds www.xastir.org, and then
click on Xastir documentation and you're there.

Also, people might get the sources from other places, or not have
> fast or convenient web access, so we need to make things as easy as
> possible for them.
>
> I feel we should tweak the "configure" output to be as
> understandable as possible, plus keep the docs up-to-date which are
> distributed with the sources.
>
> I don't want the Wiki to become the source for everything.  It
> doesn't work for everybody.  Wiki's also get hacked periodically.


The reason I was more focused on the Wiki in the context of newcomers to
Xastir and Linux is that from my own experience, I was not even aware of the
readme and install files for quite some time.  The first thing most newbies
will do is install a binary version of Xastir, and for the most part it's
going to work out of the box.  The more adventurous newbie may want to
install from source, and in that case, if he starts looking around for
instructions on how to do that, he hasn't necessarily downloaded Xastir yet,
so he doesn't have the install or readme files.

So the newbie finds the Wiki, and some HowTo docs on installing from source,
but his distribution isn't covered.  He looks at the guides for the other
distributions, and they talk about preparation before downloading the
source.  Now he goes looking for how to prepare his distribution.  It's not
obvious that he can download the source first, then look in a readme or
install file and find the info that he's looking for.  If he does download
the source first, then he still may not know where/how to find the
Install/Readme files if he is new to Linux in general (and he may not try to
find them if he doesn't know they are there).  So if the files bundled with
the code are the best place to document installation, etc., then the Wiki
should reference them so that all the google searchers out there know where
to find the information.  The install file really does have a lot of good
info in there, but it took me while to discover it.

The developers have been so helpful - this is by no means a criticism -
overall you have a great thing going here.  This has been an interesting
discussion in general about doing things to make it easier on newcomers.

Lee - K5DAT
Murphy, TX