Re: FAQ for gnu.emacs.gnus

[Galen Boyer <galenboyer@hotpop.com>]

On 20 Dec 2002, dbennett@micoks.net wrote:

> How about, "One should not have to become an elisp programmer or have
> to sort through scores of pages of the FAQ or manual or have to
> decipher possibly hundreds of list variables to set up email?  Those
> should not be part of the "learning how to use gnus anyways"
> experience.  No one will ever learn how to use gnus if they cannot get
> it installed.  You have to actually have a bicycle before you can
> learn how to ride one.
> 
> Like Don I also have gnus working correctly with newsgroups, but
> cannot get it to work with my pop3 server.  

To preface this posting, I love Emacs and enjoy almost all of my time
with it.  In this posting, I'm just relaying observations I've had as
I've added more and more functionality to my Emacs environment.

I had loads of frustration with Gnus early in my usage but these came
from the fact that I had never read newsgroups at all, with any other
reader, and I had never downloaded mail to read with any other email
reader so I didn't know anything about the protocals and beyond that,
Gnus presents its own version of these things with the "virtual server"
idea.  If I knew what the definitions of industry terms where, nntp,
pop, imap, I probably would have had a much easier time using Gnus early
on.

But, I think Emacs has alot of experiences like that.  It is easier to
start using Emacs for a particular purpose if you have already
accomplished that purpose in some other environment.  Take a simplistic
Email/News interface like Outlook Express as an example (I looked at the
dotfile generator and the following painpoints seems to be solved there,
but I think the discussion is still relevant).  During initially setting
up one's mail retrieval mechanism, you are presented with a dropdown
dialog asking you if you have a POP or IMAP server.  Now, it doesn't go
so far as to tell you what those things mean, but it does tell you your
choices, directly while setting up.  So, you might stop and go figure
out what they mean and then come back and choose.  With Gnus, you might
take awhile to understand that POP and IMAP are actually the choices
(and in my case, this took a good long while cause I had never heard of
these terms) and that they are the "main" choices.  Then you could go
figure out how to set up your .gnus to make it happen.

On the flip side, one wants to be a power user of any system, one needs
to be given access to "underneath".  It is a give and take, but the
prompting type help is where Emacs will probably always be lacking.
Emacs doesn't "notice" that a package has never been used, and therefore
send the user through a particular dialog to get them started.  The user
has to read the apropos documentation (which for gnus, doesn't seem to
point to the dotfile generation) and then open the correct files and
then type in the correct stuff in the correct format.  This can be a
daunting task when things "just work" in other environments one is used
to. 

Even in customize, I don't know the "choices".  I'm only protected from
the syntax.  I actually think the "choices" are probably more the issue
than elisp syntax.  Protection from the syntax is the least of my
worries, and not even a worry.  Knowing what to type is usually the
bigger challenge.

I don't even think I have a suggestion, or a real issue, but I have
thought through this posting 
-- 
Galen deForest Boyer
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.