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

Matthew Paul Thomas mpt at myrealbox.com
Sat Nov 4 14:57:41 UTC 2006


On Nov 1, 2006, at 3:00 PM, Eric Dunbar wrote:
>
> On 01/11/06, Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic at dantian.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 21:59 +0100, Andreas Lloyd wrote:
>>
>> 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 think the *.ubuntu.com domain is part of the legitimacy problem.
> ANYTHING under *.ubuntu.com will be treated as gospel by a sizeable
> number of people (myself included -- I wasn't aware that that section
> was NOT official Ubuntu documentation).

Count me in as someone who, despite working for Canonical, assumed the 
help.ubuntu.com instructions were reliable, and ended up with a broken 
Xorg. :-P

For me, the problem wasn't that the EdgyUpgrades page was on any 
particular domain (and anyway, many people completely ignore URLs), but 
that Google ranked it more highly than any official instructions -- if 
such instructions even exist.

> ...
> My sense is that for something like upgrades it is in the community's
> best interest if Canonical makes upgrade information CLEARLY available
> where the downloads/orders are located on Ubuntu.com.

Strongly agreed. And official instructions for "How to upgrade to 
Feisty" should be available starting from the first alpha release, *at 
the same URL* that eventually describes "How to upgrade to Ubuntu 
7.04". That way people will link to that URL during each alpha release, 
they'll link to it during the beta, and they'll link to it during each 
release candidate. So by the time the final release is made, the 
official instructions will have more Googlejuice than any others.

> Even something as simple as... "Upgrading your system with apt-get, 
> Automatix, upgrade-manager, etc. may not work. Use of the installer CD 
> is recommended." would help avoid some of the disinformation that's
> spread by people with fewer brain cells than keyboarding fingers.
> ...

I'm supposed to burn a CD just to upgrade my operating system? That 
can't be right.

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/





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