Re: Just shoot me now

[Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 22 2010,Tommy Kelly wrote:

[snipped 19 lines]

> Exactly. So I reckon that in my case at least part of the reason is
> that the split documentation is *in general* sufficiently tough-going,
> and enough of it is simply obscure to anyone not already familiar with
> what it's saying, that I (quite reasonably) end up not trusting it and
> not reverting to it even when it would in fact help me. (Hence, for
> example, me googling for info on syntax tables rather than going first
> to the emacs help). 

Funnily, mail splitting worked for me the first time I tried apart
from a few minor misses.  But mine were simple ones

(setq nnmail-split-methods
      '(("sas-l" "^Subject:.*SAS-L*")
;; 	("ctan-ann" "^From:.*ctan-ann*")
 	("mail.misc" "")))

is all I did.


>
> Some of the documentation reminds me of signage in London Heathrow
> Airport. Once you know where you're going, the signs make perfect
> sense. 

Right, you're on the same path as me.  Things don't make sense for a
long time and then suddenly everything falls into place.  Group
Parameters, for some reason took me a long time to get sorted.  But
the documentation is ummm....very clear now.  WhyTF, I didn't
understand it the first time around or for that matter many other
times before, I don't know.

On a few topics, I go through searching-for-lightswitch-in-the-dark
stumbles. 

Read the stuff in the manual and try the cryptic incantation (was Lars
drunk when he wrote that?) ;)
Doesn't work
Google and try again with someone's random code on the same thingy
it works; I read the documentation again
tweak it based on what I *think* is the understanding of what it
should do 
works again
reread the documentation; fcuk, it makes perfect sense now
2 days later,completely forget how I went from noob to semi literate
guy on the topic.  This prevents me with making any constructive
suggestion on how to make the documentation better.

Other than "Documentation is/was not clear" which only serves to
exasperate the developers.

Of course, the fault is mostly mine that I make feeble attempts at
learning elisp.  Hopefully, that and a modicum of understanding of the
English language is all that is needed.


>
> But I think if we keep chipping away -- and with occasional
> assistance from the ueber-coders (genuflects in Andreas's direction
> :-p ) -- we'll come up with some useful improvements.

Look, if you're using Gnus,then you're already tagged as a weirdo in
office. :-)
It's unlikely that a text based mail/news reader is going to win new
converts.  All I got for my personal efforts in using Gnus is just
that; personal satisfaction of working with large number of articles
and mailing lists without getting overloaded.

Not one bloke expressed interest in it apart from

"you still working on DOS?" (white on black Gnus)
"Is that Pine/Unix?" 
"What is a newsreader?"
"why is there no colour like MSLookout?"

What I'm saying is, 6 months into this Gnus, you're likely to think
that documentation is doing just fine. :)

 sivaram
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