I hate Hg extensions

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello Ben,

On 07/25/2011 10:33 PM, Ben Fritz wrote:
> Yet, the angry, ranting user would get MUCH better results by holding
> back the rant and politely asking for help. After being helped, this
> user could make a suggestion about how to avoid the problem in the
> future, preferably with specific text to add to a document or some
> other concrete way to improve the situation.

I'll leave it to others to decide if this is true or not. One possible 
counter argument is that people will not take complaints seriously if no 
one looks bothered by them. Some times you hear the opinion that 
everything is fine because other people are not complaining.


> Otherwise, you're just serving to put the developers on defense-mode.
> You are basically telling them not only "you did a bad job at creating
> this tool" but also "you are incompetent in general, for not forseeing
> such difficulties". For open-source software especially, where people
> work on the software because they enjoy doing so, you will get help
> much faster by politely asking for it than by insulting the
> developers. A lot of people worked very hard on the software you're
> trash-talking due to what is probably a misconfiguration on your end.

First: It is not my intention to insult developers. Just to be clear.

If you read through my posts, you will see that the single biggest 
source of frustration is lack of a README file or install instructions. 
This is not a misconfiguration on my end. It is one thing for the 
program to fail for a technical reason like misconfiguration or an 
upgrade that is not backwards compatible; it is another to not bother to 
write install instructions.

I can accept technical problems more easily than lack of instructions. I 
understand that writing software is difficult, and though I will get 
frustrated, I will make some effort to be patient. But when the 
distribution lacks a README file or the README file doesn't explain how 
to install the software, I will lose my temper. Install instructions are 
a standard thing to include and they are not technically difficult the 
way writing software is.

I did say that this gives the impression that developers don't care 
about users. Perhaps this is the part that you interpreted as an insult. 
I don't mean it to be an insult. I don't think there is a nice way to 
say that not having install instructions conveys that you don't care 
about users. How can I phrase that nicely?



> I saw a link to these two articles a long time ago on another mailing
> list. It's amazing to me how often I think of them because of someone
> not following their advice. And the end result is almost always the
> same. The discussion moves away from the actual issue at hand, gets
> people angry, and generally fails to solve the problem.


Well you see, in this case the biggest problem in my view is not whether 
I get TortoiseHg running or not. It is a general frustration with third 
party software around Mercurial. I would happily give up TortoiseHg for 
my own use if it meant that I could call up a friend and confidently 
tell them to go grab thg and be sure that *they* would be able to manage 
without problem.

Daniel.
-- 
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.