[Moin-user] Why oh why!

[Greg Noel]

Let me give you my take on this.

On Dec 10, 2008, at 2:54 AM, Thomas Waldmann wrote:

> We provide documentation and expect that people read them ... docs/ 
> CHANGES contains docs about every noteworthy change we do, ...

Aye, there's the rub.  Buried in the blizzard of literally a thousand  
that's-nice-but-I-don't-give-a-damn enhancements that require no  
action on my part are a couple of lines of do-this-or-your-upgrade- 
will-fail action.  Before I upgraded, I read the docs.  When I had  
problems, I read the docs again, did Google searches, the whole nine  
yards.  I still had to ask on the mailing list.

Yes, the information is there in docs/CHANGES, but part of _your_ job  
in preparing an upgrade is to highlight the information I absolutely  
must know in order to succeed.  You didn't do that, and people are  
rightfully complaining.

My experience with the upgrade was bad enough that I've resisted doing  
any more upgrades.  You say you've done better, but you still have a  
huge file of piddly detail that you expect every one of us to plow  
through for the one or two points where we must actually do  
something.  And even then there's not a lot of help.  It's not enough  
to know that the, say, authentication API has changed, there needs to  
be some guidance how my code has to change, more than just "look in  
the new files."

 From what I've seen on the mailing list, many of your users are not  
accomplished Python programmers; some of them can't even program.  And  
most of us just don't have the time to dig through the source code to  
figure out what to do.  You have to cater to us by providing clear,  
explicit, _complete_ documentation about how to upgrade, or we'll look  
elsewhere for someone who makes it easier.

Hope this helps,
-- Greg Noel, retired UNIX guru