On Thursday 15 April 2004 00.34, Phil Mocek wrote:
Discussion on this thread seems to repeatedly confuse support with the publication of documentation. With thorough, quality, documentation, you don't need support unless you haven't the time to read documentation or are lacking the skills to understand it.
First of all, nobody can keep up with everything, not even a Debian fanatic Secondly, we have the sources, how much more thorough documentation do you need? When I come across a problem, I more often than not find myself digging through the sources to see how things work. This takes a while, but I usually come up with a solution. Then, later, I find that it is indeed documented in /usr/share/doc/packages, where most (if not all) suse changes are documented. When they upgraded cyrus-imap and changed the database format, that caused me to waste several hours of work trying to find why things didn't work, only to find that it was well documented
Given the fact that the closest SuSE comes to publishing known issues for their software (and ``their software'' consists primarily of their installer, a custom-compiled Linux kernel, YaST/SuSEconfig, and their SuSE-fied repackaging of software written/maintained by GNU and others) is the SDB, a big list of symptoms and suggested remedies without any direct link to the individual packages that comprise SuSE Linux, I just can't imagine using SuSE for anything besides, say, a home machine on which I want to just install the whole ball o' wax and leave it alone until the next major distro version is released.
That policy doesn't work well when you want to tighten security by installing the minimum set of software that meets your needs, and then install additional packages as needed in the future.
"They don't have documentation, so I have to install everything"? Hm