Oops, re aptitude : was [Re: Edgy in the news]

[Mario Vukelic]

[I received a reply off-list which I think belongs into the open as well
as my reply to it]

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 21:21 +0100, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> If Matthew now says that 'it's simply documentation written by the
> community, and is not either "official" or "by Canonical"' then it seems
> to me that there is no official upgrade documentation at all. This is a
> very wrong situation.
> 
> If there is an "official" upgrade doc, please point me to it.

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 23:49 +0000, <someone> wrote:
> How about the release notes:
> http://www.ubuntu.com/download/releasenotes/610
> That's at the official Ubuntu domain

Thanks for the pointer. However, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ is
also at the official domain, the only difference being that the upgrades
notes are in then "community area".  My confusion highlights 2
significant problems: 

One, it is very hard (impossible for the casual user I'd say) to
distinguish community information from official information. I am surely
no internet or linux newbie and I am used to keep an eye out for
misinformation, and in this case I kind of failed. I'd argue that the
website design is much too similar to make the difference clear

Two, the amount of misleading or outright wrong information out there is
breathtaking. If you read ubuntu-users you could tear out your hair
because you see newbies lead into hosing there systems left and right.
For a while I have tried to fight this as good as I can and correct the
"just change source.list and dist-upgrade" advice whenever I came across
it, but there are not enough free hours in my day for that, not even
taking into account that this topic is only a tiny amount of the wrong
advice given.
Now it seems that even the community help website gives wrong
information, and that Canonical instead of educating users and
correcting it, simply washes its hands and says, "well what do you rely
on community info for, stupid." This is still a very wrong state of
affairs.
I understand that how to contain wrong advice is a hard unsolved
problem. (Another example is that there are STILL people on ubuntu-users
(not to even speak of slashdot or other tech websites) who recommend
Automatix, which will lead to the next round of hosed updates for
Feisty.) But if Canonical wants Ubuntu Linux to be huge AND
user-friendly it needs to start thinking about how to solve this.