[Haskell-cafe] Re: Frustrating experience of a wannabe contributor

[Andreas Marth]

Thanks for again pointing out that I didn't want another way to get the
information, but I have to defend Simon.
His first response was a reworking of the wiki page for the haskell mailing
lists.
What led me to learning about gmain and its search function.
So I added the hint that you can use gmain to search in the mailing archives
on that page.
And now hopefully the next person who tries to find something in the mailing
lists succeds in doing so. :-)

That leaves 2 (of my original 3) points:
1) make the wiki search function return all documents containig the search
term (who can do that?)
2) consider creating a new wiki topic "Problems and solutions working with
haskell"

As the 2nd point regards the main wiki page I think the community should be
involved with that decision.
I don't really want that topic but we are missing a categorie here.

Kind regards
Andreas

PS: I don't consider my self a newcomer. :-) I am on this list already a
couple of years, I just don't post to often.
(Actually the recent discussion about maintaining the community and the
progress of newcomers to experts inspired me to move forward and put
something on the wiki.)



----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Schafer" <steve at fenestra.com>
To: <haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 10:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Frustrating experience of a wannabe
contributor


On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:00:20 -0700, you wrote:

>You can even post via gmane.
>
>Tip: for more powerful searching, use Thunderbird + gmane's NNTP interface.

I think people are missing the original poster's point. He's not looking
for alternative ways to get from A to B; he's pointing out that a
typical approach that one might try to get from A to B is broken.

As an aside, this seems to be a prevalent issue, particularly with
non-commercial technically-oriented communities. When a newcomer says,
"Hey, I tried this [intuitively obvious] way to do something, and it
didn't work," the welcoming response is NOT, "Oh, don't do that; do this
other [less intuitive] thing instead." The welcoming response is to fix
the damn thing so that the intuitive approach works!

Steve Schafer
Fenestra Technologies Corp.
http://www.fenestra.com/
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