[PATCH] expand and clarify help for update

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 31.10.2008 19:18, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> I haven't ever provided paid support for Mercurial (though I have
> provided quite a lot of unpaid support!), and if I did, it would
> probably be development work, no hand-holding.

I was referring to
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/Support

which states

"The following people provide consulting, training, and commercial
support for Mercurial:"

which lists you.

I have no problem with anybody offering paid support
for Mercurial (it is an excellent thing, in fact).

> This seems like a
> circumstantial ad hominem-attack, trying to imply that
> less-than-optimal documentation is somehow to my benefit.

No it wasn't. If it looked like that, I apologize.
It wasn't meant like that.

I really do appreciate your very extensive and very
valuable work on the project, BTW.

The feeling I was trying to express was that I think
there is too much of an attitude of "just ask" or "people
have to ask anyway", or it is "too complex to read up
and understand themselves", which I think would be the
very wrong way.

This creates some sort of "closed club" feeling, which
truly isn't needed.

We should try to make ourselves -- we who probably to
some degree know a bit more about Mercurial than most
average users -- unneeded as much as we can.

A perfect tool should not need any sort of "local guru"
in a team. Or at least aim at reaching that goal as
far as possible.

It's also a wrong attitude to assume that people
don't read or get scared by some text around 50 lines.

I know I have written that myself at times ("people
don't read" - I was referring to the excellent hgbook then),
but we should try not to exaggerate here.

There are quite a couple of people who are perfectly
fine reading some 50 lines of text (even among hg users).

It's also to some degree a question how to order
that information. You can stop reading when you
have got what you need. I tried to organize the text
like that.

Frankly (of course I'm exaggerating), I think there is
just a tad too much of a "one liner" attitude on this
project.

We shouldn't leave puzzles for the users.