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

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 21:59 +0100, Andreas Lloyd wrote:
> One central point would be to integrate as much of what Automatix does
> directly into the GNOME application installer 

Good point

> With regards to the problem of faulty advice, that is very tricky to
> cover. 

For the websites:
Maybe there should be an official area by Canonical, one supervised area
at help.ubuntu.com/community, and a free area at wiki.ubuntu.com. All
three should have a distinguishable website design that makes the
different levels obvious.
I don't see a way around some oversight over the community part of
help.ubuntu.com, at least for some articles. E.g., it really should not
be possible to maliciously or ignorantly add harmful advice to
EdgyUpgrades, especially not around the release of Edgy.

The mailing lists and forums are an even harder problem, both because
they are a more sprawling environment and because the amount of
wrong/outdated info that is given is huge.

> Old (Debian) habits die hard, and people will have difficulty
> accepting that what has been good advice for years now is at fault.

I don't believe this is the real issue. Some good Debian advice might be
outdated and harmful, but the much bigger amount comes from people who
seem to think they derive some cred by having run Debian before Ubuntu.
Too often the advice that is given would have been just as wrong for
Debian as it is for Ubuntu. I have run Slink through Sarge, and never
ever was it good advice to "just replace a by b in sources.list and rund
apt-get dist-upgrade." It NEVER worked like this. It's just that Debian
users were in general more knowledgeable and could deal with the
breakage resulting from this - many hardly noticed the many manual
tweaks that were needed to make it work.

The task at hand I think is to educate to broad community to give useful
advice. How to do that I don't know either, but I think it's high time
to start to think about it