[Moin-user] Why oh why!
Greg Noel
GregNoel at tigris.org
Thu Dec 11 18:48:37 EST 2008
On Dec 11, 2008, at 7:35 AM, JT Moree wrote:
> If you find that really great support (moinmoin or other wikis) for
> free let me know. I'd love to have someone else maintain my wikis
> for me. ;)
>
I'm not talking about free support (although I admit it would be
nice), I'm talking about something as simple as separating the items
in the list of changes into two categories: the many hundreds that
don't require any action by anybody and the handful that may require
some action by somebody. And particularly, in this case, the one
action that was required by _everybody_. (If it was so mandatory, why
didn't the first startup of the new engine simply run the conversion?
Or if there were manual decisions required, why didn't the engine fail
to start until the schema was updated?)
Other open source projects seem to be able to do that, so I don't
think it's asking too much. The quality may be uneven in how well the
actions are explained, but at least there's a _short_, well-
highlighted section that gets you started.
Don't get me wrong. I like MoinMoin. It's flexible and extensible,
and that has helped us. But I'm really disappointed in how poorly
this was handled.
On the one hand, I see some statements to the effect that this is done
better now, but on the other hand, I don't get the impression that the
developers have learned the entire lesson from this experience. It's
really quite simple: not everyone avidly follows everything that the
MoinMoin team does; some of us have other things we'd prefer to do
with our time. I'd imagine that in a lot of cases, the only thing
users will encounter is the upgrade instructions. If those
instructions don't guide them through every step needed to upgrade
successfully, the developers aren't doing their job. And telling
users to read through a list of a thousand changes is actively
avoiding doing their job.
Hope this helps,
-- Greg Noel, retired UNIX guru
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