[mythtv-users] Setting up an FAQ for LiveTV changes

Steve Adeff adeffs at gmail.com
Mon Jan 16 04:29:39 UTC 2006


On Sunday 15 January 2006 16:49, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
>     > Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:21:16 -0500
>     > From: "Tom E. Craddock Jr." <sigtom at sigtom.com>
>     >
>     > Jens Baumeister wrote:
>     > > Hi,
>     > >
>     > > since the LiveTV changes seem to lead to questions again and again
>     > > (and sometimes to flamewars), I volunteer to write an FAQ about it.
>     > >
>     > > However, while I do know how things are currently working, I'm not
>     > > 100% sure about the planned state for the 0.19 release. (Esp. from
>     > > the user perspective: What setting are planned, etc.) I'd be
>     > > grateful for any pointers to resources (bug tickets, list threads) 
>     > > I can mine for further information.
>     > >
>     > > That way, we'd have a single place to point people to when the
>     > > question comes up again.
>     > >
>     > > Jens
>     >
>     > You mean besides the archives at gossamer-threads for the -users,
>     > -dev, and -commit lists?
>
> [Someone's volunteering to make the documentation better, and you're
> actively trying to discourage him?  Why?  Not to mention that this
> sort of documentation has to be written -sometime- as part of a user
> manual, right?  Presumably the end state is for the way LiveTV
> operates to be documented somewhere, the proposed FAQ would be
> a good start at getting that written.]
>
> In any event---yes, in addition to the archives.  Searching archives
> is a poor substitute for organized information in a central place.
> The archives are huge (2400 messages/month! 14 meg/month!); poorly
> organized (threads often wander); and invariably contain large amounts
> of outdated information---by definition, most of it is old.  Further,
> it's never clear from any given message whether some later message
> might obsolete it---and it's often hard to tell, since it's very hard
> to prove a negative, e.g., that there -isn't- some other message/
> thread that, if only you'd used a slightly different search term,
> you'd have found.  People who don't also subscribe to all the lists
> may not know that there's been a discussion about something, hence
> won't know if they've used the wrong search term and failed to find it.
>
> Finally, even if you succeed in all that, searching through archives
> is very time consuming compared to just reading a web page---and the
> web page could have author(s) and a modification-date and a "here are
> exactly the versions we're talking about and not these other versions
> over here" and all sorts of other contextual data that would make
> using the information a whole lot easier.  If information changes
> that obsoletes a wiki page, it's likely someone will update it.
> If an old thread gets obsoleted, it will -never- get updated, but
> it won't be obvious where the new information is.
>
> And regardless of whether you think that the information is
> theoretically available in the archives, it clearly isn't available
> enough in practice, or we wouldn't have exactly the problem that Jens
> is trying to solve---namely that the list is full of people asking the
> same questions about LiveTV over and over.  That stuff is clearly
> already in the archives, and clearly not being found.  He's proposing
> to save everybody a lot of time (the questioners, the answerers, those
> who read the list and have to wade past the same questions a lot), and
> I'd think that anyone who's offering to do this should be showered
> with candy and flowers, not made to justify his actions for a
> situation that's obviously chewing up peoples' time and leading
> to flamewars and hard feelings.


http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

-- 
Steve


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