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Re: cygwin & openssh(d) & login without password


On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 05:31:03PM -0700, lex ein wrote:
>On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 10:47:57 +0200, Corinna Vinschen  <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
>>On Oct  5 16:00, David Campbell wrote:
>>>I've read lots of web pages about how to set it up, and I believe I've
>>>followed them, eg http://bumblebee.lcs.mit.edu/ssh2/ (for openssh to
>>>openssh):
>>
>>WHY DON'T YOU READ THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION INSTEAD?  [caps mine]
>>OpenSSH comes with a lot of man pages.  Then there's
>>/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/openssh.README.  Then you could have used
>>ssh-host-config and ssh-user-config for the basic configuration.
>
>BECAUSE in the case of openssh(and others), the "official
>documentation" is of little use to a new user: information is not
>gathered, stored, or presented in a orderly, logical, or sensible
>hierarchical manner, is not meaningfully cross-referenced, and is not
>reasonably searchable.  There's just no usable thread to pull to
>unravel the mystery, either.

You know about the concept of a FAQ right?

http://cygwin.com/faq/faq_3.html#SEC24

>Let's examine the steps a new user might pursue:

What an amazingly hyperbolic response to an innocuous attempt by Corinna
to help a user with problems.  Even if you arguably read a hint of
exasperation in her reply, this over-the-top response contained an
order of magnitude more vitriol than anything you could squeeze from
Corinna's message.  And it wasn't even directed at you.

I think I need another acronym besides YJS for this one.  I can't
think of a non-profane one right now.

The state of cygwin documentation is directly related to the state of
UNIX documentation.  It is not a goal of the cygwin project to improve
on the woeful state of UNIX/Linux documentation.  The mechanism that
we use in cygwin for documentation is the Linux model.

There is undoubtedly much room for improvement in the current state of
Cygwin (aka Linux/UNIX) documentation but it seems paradoxical to expect
people who are excoriated for lacking the ability to understand the
plight of the poor newbie to somehow improve things for them.

Why is it that all of the people who still have the raw wounds from
trying to set up ssh have not stepped forward to offer their
contributions for improvement?  It seems like we are again in another
thread where people think that they are customers who can make
suggestions to customer support rather than potential contributors who
can think about donating their time to improving what they can.

You can make a difference here by providing documentation or software to
improve the situation.  If you want to help, send some words to be
incorporated into a document.  Send a suggestion for how to do get "man
-k" working.  Offer a spiffy GUI hyperlinked program which will be
easy-to-use for "newbies".

Insulting maintainers ("dinosaur mentality", snidely criticizing
documentation) is not a constructive way to get anything done, yet many
people seemed to think this was actually a message containing good
points rather than the standard hackneyed diatribe against the awful
state of UNIX documentation.

I *do* get that it is hard for some people to install ssh and other
packages.  I really do.  I would love to Cygwin's usability improved.
It seems that the people who have suffered through, and won out over,
the usability problems have no desire to do anything to improve the
situation and think that these tasks are only up to the cygwin
developers.

Oh well.  Welcome to free software.
--
Christopher Faylor			spammer? ->	aaaspam@sourceware.org
Cygwin Co-Project Leader				aaaspam@duffek.com
TimeSys, Inc.

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