Step 2 again: Ha, ha, just kidding, that would be to straight forward. Please install this dependency installer program that only this and two other projects use. Pip grep panda cholotte poetry bash docker numpty anaconda jupternotebook alacazam. Oh, you don’t have it? Well, I’m sure the project page will tell you how to install it and add it to path!
Step 3: Run " program name" and … “insanely detailed description of what to do once the program opens”
Step 3 again: When you run it, get error “k*args passed null into program, so eat shit you can’t fix this”
Step 4: Go to git hub issue page and see people have been complaining about this error for 6 months, but it was working back then when it’s 12 dependency hadn’t been updated yet. No fix incoming since the programmer was a chineese grad student that graduated 6 months ago and stopped working on the code.
This is why I like Docker. It’s basically “works on my machine” as a service.
Similarly, I’m starting to really like dev containers. They’re Docker containers with all the required dev tools already installed inside, and a config so that VS Code knows how to spin up a new container when you want to do dev work on the project. They use VS Code remoting - a VS Code server runs in the container and the regular VS Code desktop app connects to it.
I was recently dealing with a project that has some Ruby dev tools and it was 100x easier to deal with since they were using dev containers.
A discord server with absurd amounts of over emphasised text, making nothing stand out, filled with emojis and broken up into different messages and sections at the exactly worst places for legibility.
No messages are answered in any channel, and you get amazing sense of all of the technology we have to communicate but zero ability to use it.
Any of the modern forum systems (Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB) is fine as long as it works. Previous-gen forum systems (SMF, phpBB, MyBB, Vanilla, etc) are fine too.
They’re still waiting to be mainstreamed into the kernel. The process of integrating drivers into the kernel is complicated. Coding practices of the coder that wrote the driver play a large part in that. Buggy or badly written code will not get accepted. Not all of these drivers have the code quality that is required in order to be merged with the kernel.
Discord could be a decent place for technical support, the way irc used to be used, but unless it’s super active with knowledgeable, helpful people, forums/GitHub discussions and other asynchronous comms channels make way more sense.
Otherwise it’s like shouting into the void and the signal to noise ratio on my discord channels is really low.
Plus with forums and discussion boards they can be stickied and indexed to be searched. So the next time someone has that error message they can pull up that exact discussion.
Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.
Search engines can not index discord.
archive can not archive discord.
Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.
Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.
and so many people are already searching for solutions to problems and cant find them, because they are locked away on discord.
I fucking hate it.
and its only gonna get worse with the years to come, as more data is centralized in discord and locked forever away from search engines, or worse, lost with the discord gets deleted or if the company goes under.
and no ones saying to not have a discord. Just use it for what its meant to be used as. Social interaction. And stop using it for what it very obviously isnt, which is a information repository.
as annoying as havin all the answers on reddit was, at least they popped up in a search engine so you could find an answer to what your problems were.
I can’t wait until Discord have to start charging for features that are currently free (since they have to be profitable eventually), projects using it freak out about it, and end up switching to a different closed-source hosted system that’ll do the same thing years later. It already happened with OSS projects using Slack that migrated to Discord. People just don’t learn from the past.
Speaks to the fact that we apparently need better and new alternatives or make current tools easier to use.
Certain aspects of discord seem to resonate with people (unfortunately…).
Man pages are great as mentioned, but maybe not as accessible to some people. Are there tools to generate more convenient resources (e.g. wikis) from that? Similar to how generating technical documentations from (structured) code comments.
best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what’s that? you’re looking for a fix to an issue you’re having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we’ve already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway
I think we fixed that for someone a few months ago, maybe you can scroll back and find it. I think the guys handle was user-something, might have been around May…
There are so many tools to make documentation for your project. LATEX is a great one, and you can use it to easily host your documentation online. And it’s really not difficult at all to do by hand. If you can have it on discord you can certainly have it in a repo.
Maybe it’s a cynical ploy to increase community engagement with their project by getting them into the discord. Regardless, it gives me The Ick. Very gross.
I personally don’t like LaTeX for documentation because it doesn’t benefit much from advanced features of LaTeX, while being more difficult to read/write than Markdown.
Discord is great for building a community because it’s the defacto chat service for communities. It replaced IRC and does that quite well. Having a place to casually chat with people more invested in the project has its advantages.
Now I really dislike it if they think discord can replace a wiki. Iirc discord added a wiki-like feature a while ago and it’s terrible because it’s not indexable by search engines.
I think you give Discord too much credit even with that. They’re closed source and have very little openness with their data. We have no clue how they store and archive our data and conversations, or what they do with it. I don’t think the open source community should trust Discord an inch.
I’m really hoping an open source alternative starts gaining traction.
A agree with everything you just wrote. Discord is the platform of choice for many projects because most people are already there, so it increases engagement (and often enough some people actually ask for an official discord).
I personally prefer projects to use matrix, despite all it’s faults. Some already do.
LaTeX is great, but I prefer Markdown for software documentation (bonus points if your flavor of markdown supports LaTeX-style math). Standard LaTeX is geared towards typesetting and formatting, which is great for reports and journals, but not so much for software documentation, so you end up with a lot of boilerplate. Markdown syntax is also more accessible to beginners, I feel. And if you have a really big project that requires features like cross-references, there’s things like myst markdown.
Both are powerful tools, though with different strengths as you describe. I was thinking more with automation in mind. But regardless, anything is better than a discord server. Even .txt documentation!
It’s not really about the tools, we have plenty of tools, plain text, markdown, latex, web pages. Putting content to readable format is the easy part.
The hard part is knowing what to put down and how to organize it, and making sure that your documented explanations are actually understandable.
Particularly when you want to get traction going you might really want conversations to help you understand where the project needs fixing versus how documentation needs fixing and get a sense for what documentation might be helpful.
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