- Previous message: Hunter Lewis: "Re: Name service error for name=yahoo.com"
- Maybe in reply to: Matt England: "Re: Why make the "virtual" directory world executable?"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
|
|
|
From: Matt England (no email)
Date: Wed Jun 01 2005 - 08:10:15 EDT
Thanks for continuing this point Keith. I'm interested in this
"documentation for many different uses of a general application" dynamic
for many purposes beyond just postfix...so I might get a little theoretical
here with postfix as a case study, in hopes this does not aggravate anyone
on the list.
At 6/1/2005 12:08 AM, Keith Matthews wrote:
>On Tue, 31 May 2005 23:19:31 -0500
>Part of the problem is that postfix is not always set up to work with
>courier, or MySQL. Different sites have different needs that must be
>addressed differently.
Its it reasonable to have these different needs/scenarios/usages addresses
with different articles/topics within one content sources, while still
gathered under one "policied" (by a general user-list community like this
one) umbrella?
>There is also the standard FLOSS problem of individual's preferred
>solutions (and anyone who doesn't think that is a problem just go to any
>Linux newsgroup and ask 'should I use Emacs or vi' or 'which is the best
>filesystem type') and many of those preferences are based on emotion
>rather than cold logic and will be expressed in absolute terms.
Yes, very well understood and experienced.
> > So why not leverage the power of a wiki in one site?
> >
>
>One of the lessons I have learned in 32 years in the business is that
>there is rarely just *one* right answer. Typically there are a number
>that are clearly wrong (like the permissions you and Victor were
>discussing), and there are a number that could be right, but only one
>*right* answer is very rare.
I believe that one right answer is not what I seek. Rather, I seek one
resource that has a set of "approved" answers by a community and/or whose
content will be continually reviewed and updated over time. "One resource"
in this case could be a single website with multiple mechanisms to an
individual to propose documentation content for it to be implicitly
reviewed and changed if a review community finds discrepancies.
As for the various solutions:
There could be a use-postfix-with-courier-imap-and-mysql-without-sasl2 page
(which I'm currently doing) that could cross-reference more
pages. Alternative viewpoints could both be presented in the same
article. Discussions could be linked via a email list (like this one)
and/or a web forum (even better with thread links) or both (via something
like mail2forum.com or CM2F).
IF (and this may be a big if) this is suitable, why does this community not
crawl all over a postfix-based wiki and make it their own, advertise it to
new potential admin-users, etc. It seems to me that this would make
postfix all that more attractive to new users trying to do the "do a I
choose exim/qmail/sendmail/courier/postfix?" thing.
I'm using these mechanisms in my corporate software development group
seemingly quite effectively. In fact, I have trouble thinking how I could
get by without it.
Alas, it hasn't happened...so I'm curious if Keith's above points and/or
other dynamics have kept it from happening.
>I would add that if there is a single point then it tends to express a
>single viewpoint only. Wikipedia is getting to be a classic example of
>that where there are people who care more about having the style correct
>than they do about having correct information (not to mention those who
>think that one country's terminology is the only *right* one to use).
I haven't yet experienced that in the Wikipedia technical articles (and
some of them have saved me big time, or at least the ones on
meta.wikimedia.org), but that's interesting.
-Matt
|
|
|