Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Online book for usability

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

> > Next time you have to explain something to a user who has read some
> > simple documentation, and that explanation has to be longer than one
> > phrase, or next time you have to answer a user something along the 
> > lines
> > of "you are doing the wrong thing", ask yourself whether burdening the
> > user with all that irrelevant (to the task at hand) information is 
> > worth
> > the trouble.
>
> Often it will be, in the case of Arch.
>
> Part of what's going on with newbies is that when they use CVS or
> other systems, they often use them as "black boxes" and with very poor
> sense either of what's going on, or of what the tool is capable of.
>
> Arch is doing much _better_ than CVS in that it at least leads users
> to _try_ to use scm-features they hadn't thought of before --- in some
> cases, the UI doesn't lead some users far enough.
>
> So, newbies to Arch, unlike newbies to, say, svn, often face two, not
> one problem:
>
>    1) learning to use a new tool (tla/svn/cvs/whatever)
>
>    2) learning what revision control is for and is capable of
>       in the first place

 Ah, a thread I can chime in on.

 Ahem.

 What's going on with newbies is that we're frustrated with CVS, and we 
want something
better. So we go to arch, which looks much better.

 So then we try to learn how to do everything at once, rather then 
incrementally. Whereupon we hit the wall, because while 
using/understanding arch for a single user is easy, for multiple users 
(most CVS users) its much harder. You might argue that's because you 
have to really understand revision control. That's not true. I already 
understand revision control, its arch I don't understand with respect 
to multiple archives/branches/mirrors and how all that relates to my 
work.

Pierce

P.S.

 The complicated archive/revisions specifiers don't help, since they 
add a minor degree of lack of understanding to each piece of the 
tutorial, when in fact, they generally aren't needed. In CVS, while you 
can, you don't have to type:

 -d :ext:address@hidden:/Repository

 in front of every command. So the CVS tutorials all omit that stuff, 
for the benefit of the tutorial.