From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <32a656c2050524093932165200@mail.gmail.com> Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 01:39:12 +0900 From: Vester Thacker To: Russ Cox , Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] the futility of #plan9 on irc In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline References: <20050523233359.GD14127@xware.cx> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 52549a2c-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 5/25/05, Russ Cox wrote: > I have not posted my opinion of the IRC crowd. I merely posted some > evidence that they were, one one particular occasion, completely > full of shit. People can make their own decisions about whether > to generalize. Rationalize. One out of how many? We are not talking all or nothing.=20 =20 > I think reading the FAQ, poking around the Wiki, and then > asking on 9fans is a much more reliable way to go. Sure, but a lot of folks that we meet on IRC rush into Plan 9 and hit=20 hurdles during the install/configuration process. Then they want=20 answers, so they go to IRC for a quick remedy.=20 We are the first response team for their answers. I do not believe=20 that the folks volunteering to help on IRC are out to misguide people=20 intentionally. Granted a few tend to be a little overzealous at times, but not always. I am not certain that telling the consumer that he/she should go to a mailing list for the quick answer is always the best solution. It seems that IRC will alleviate the problem sooner. Granted if=20 the question is more technical, it should go to 9fans. I'll meet you half way and say that if one of our volunteers=20 berates one of the newbies, I'll ban the offender from the #plan9 channel. I'll even go the extra mile to have them banned from freenode. We could go with a no tolerance approach, or a 3 strikes and your out approach.=20 > Poking around the IRC logs from the first week of May, > I have learned that the /sys/src/9 kernels have no > SCSI support (only /sys/src/fs does) and that there is > no way for acme to pipe the current buffer through a > program. Sometimes, when such misinformation is stated > as fact, someone is around to correct it. But just as often > it seems that no one is around to correct it. And if you're > a newbie and you get the latter, I don't believe that you've > done better than asking on 9fans and waiting a little while. It's a fact of life that people make mistakes. If we hit an=20 85 percent accuracy rate then we are doing great. Most=20 weather forecasters don't do that well. -vester