From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Mon May 13 2002 - 11:02:59 EDT
On Mon, 2002-05-13 at 06:00, david thompson wrote:
> hi
>
> I seem to have got some points wrong, or at least one which produced
> another error - namely that I did not realise that every posting to this
> forum is open. So to the person-developer who flamed me regarding my
> crit. of finding this file or making it accessible I apologise. I
> apologise for writing about a sneeky attack etc.
Apology accepted. FWIW, I'm sorry about flaming you. I don't hunt
newbies for sport, and if you look through the archives of abiword-user
(http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-user/) and in bugzilla
for the past 2 or 3 years, you'll find that I and the whole abiword
community has been *overwhelmingly* helpful toward "newbies", provided
that they ask nicely (or at least not rudely).
The AbiWord community tries to be very helpful toward new users. Our
default "use cases" all have a "Church Secretary" as our intended
audience. This secretary is an *extreme* newbie, and basically knows how
to turn on her computer.
We've strived to write lots of documentation for the community. David
Chart, Tomas Frydrych, and I have written a lot of high-quality
documentation for the AbiWord project in both ABW and HTML formats
(David Chart is a professional documentation writer amongst other
things, btw). There are also other TXT files that get shipped with
AbiWord, and they tell you how to do things like installing new fonts,
how to properly set up your locale, how to display AbiWord on a remote
XServer, etc... Our BUILD.TXT file has pertinent libgal related issues.
Unfortunately, not everything is (or should be) included in the
documentation. In fact, the documentation is an evolving body of work
hopefully intended to be useful for as many people as possible. The
documentation, like the rest of the project, is done entirely by
volunteers in our free time. Until we're capable of documenting
everything under the sun, things will be less than complete.
Just as a general maxim, I try to look for answers myself before I go
asking people. I find that google tends to be a good tool for this, as
someone on the planet has probably had the same (or similar) problem
before. There are also mailing list archives that you can search through
(and google has already searched through them). When I get stuck and
want help, I ask nicely. Imagine that this thread had never gotten
started if you had just said this in your first email:
"Hi, I'm having problems installing AbiWord because I can't find
libgal.so.7 on a RedHat7 machine. Can you please tell me what the
problem is or how I might solve it? If it is a recurring problem, could
you please make a note of it in your documentation so that others can
avoid it in the future? Thanks, David"
Just food for thought,
Dom
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