[wsfii-discuss] Whole Infrastructure Catalogue

Sun Oct 16 11:31:54 UTC 2005

As you know, this sort of project dear to my heart - the tech ain't no
use if people can't *use* it. Would just add that on the linux learning
curve, the most frustrating thing I found was the lack of examples.

When you 're teaching a language, it's no use taking hours to explain
the concept of future-plu-perfect to a bunch of people who don't have
that tense in their first language cos the students will (a) just glaze
in frustrated boredom and (b) be unable to deploy it even if they
understand it. You need to say: "by next week, I will have finished my
project". Aaaaahhhhh! sez the class as a lightbulb appears over its
collective head . . . and then they can extrapolate fresh examples such
as: Ooooh, in a few weeks I will have learned Linux!

So, in addition to giving a man list of commands and parameters and 4
pages of conceptual essay, it would be really helpful also to give a
couple of examples of completed commands for the app/process in question
(from which one can extrapolate the rest from the man list). This
would've saved me hours of banging my head on the floorboards whilst
learning Linux and its apps . . . I've found the unofficial Ubuntu guide
rather good for this - it really does do what it says on the tin:
http://ubuntuguide.org/

Which begs the question of which distro(s) - since another frustrating
thing is trying out a whole bunch of commands gleaned from all over the
web to, say, restart Samba before finally figuring out that it ain't
done the same way on, say, Debian as it is on, say, RedHat.

I would've thought that this is one of the things that a wiki format
will work well with? I think it a really good suggestion to divide up
the architecture of a Linux distro itself and assign groups to each
section? I'm up for this (I mean doing actual work as well as burbling
in emails) . . .

Paula

hugh barnard wrote:

> Hi
>  
> Those are good subjects and I'd go somewhat further:
>  
> 1. A lot of the barriers are 'documentation, democratisation and
> integration'
>  
> 2. I often find it tough getting things to work, because the doc is
> spread about and often quite challenging. And, I have a certain amount
> of technical knowledge, so imagine the problem for the 'rest of the
> world'.
>  
> 3. For democratisation (probably not a word, but), I'd like to see and
> collaborate on 'franchise manuals', how to set up and operate x. I'm
> not going to mention McDonalds, but one can learn from them, in this
> respect.
> There are commercially based print on demand publishers now that _may_
> make a viable small run alternative/medium to O'Reilly!
>  
> 4. It's even tougher to make 'architectural' schemes for things to
> work together (especially giving a process and economic model as
> well). It's also arguable that these schemes shouldn't be
> 'architectural' (because that's probably too controlling) but more
> 'pharmacological' (what will work with what, without too much pain).
>  
> To be ambitious it's maybe time to think along these lines again:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog 
> Whole Infrastructure Catalogue anyone?
>  
> Best regards Hugh
> http://hughbarnard.org
>  
>
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