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Re: gEDA-user: PCB & Gschem



On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 09:14:48PM +0000, Marc Price wrote:
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> I dont think that anyone who has written these wiki has ever heared of<br>
> <big><big><big><big><br>
> KISS<br>

I think he probably has heared, and if he hasn't, he can look it up on
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

The problem here is a teacher syndrome - the people are highly skilled
in design of gEDA but are unable to imagine how an average use of the
package feels. For example if you have written the keyboard interface,
you know all shortcut keys by heart. Then you don't notice that
corresponding menu entries are missing (like with CTRL-M in PCB, or did
I miss anything?)

The problem usually gets swept under the carpet with "we don't have
time" which is an universal phrase to excuse anything ;-)

Also developers generally tend to take any criticism as a personal
attack because they know the user's knowledge of the system is limited
compared to theirs so generally suspect the criticism to be mere
bullshitting with rude attempt to blame the problems on the developer.
They are not aware of the developer/teacher syndrome.

I think a better approach would be to put the fragmented documentation
into one proper user manual in the style of Exim:
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/spec.html/index.html

With Exim, my experience was straightforward. Installed Exim. Now what?
I want to send e-mails.
1) google.com: Exim
2) Documentastion and FAQs
3) The Exim Specification - Version 4.6x (PDF)
4) There I found out that the documentation is written in a way that
truely minimizes lookup time. That means, considering the distribution
pattern of all possible questions the user could have, the decision tree
of links/headlines is built in a way that the general time spend on
looking up is minimized. I set up the system and it worked, didn't take
much time and that was it. All is there, no FAQs, no Wikis.

CL<

> <br>
> KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID<br>
> <small><small><small><small><br>
> MARC <span class="moz-smiley-s4"><span> :-P </span></span></small></small></small></small><br>
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