[smokeping-users] smokeping config file

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi Niko,

On Sun, 17 Oct 2010, Niko Tyni wrote:

> Leaving the general Debian bashing aside, I've done quite a bit of work
> with the Debian smokeping packages and I'm sorry it didn't work for you.

Please don't take my post as a reflection on you personally, I didn't
mean to criticize you in any way.  I know that you've done an enormous
amount of work on this, and your efforts really are appreciated.  When
I installed Smokeping from the sources I had no problems.  Or not those
sorts of problems, anyway. :)

> I'd love to see a new maintainer for the package ... The package has
> been up for adoption since February, see http://bugs.debian.org/568742

At about the same time that I began to use Debian, in 2007, I joined
several Debian-sepcific lists.  I made serious attempts to improve the
Debian documentation, some of which is even more out of date than many
applications distributed with 'stable'.  My reward was almost nothing
but spam from the list servers.  I suggested improvement to the list
servers and was ignored.  As far as I could tell, nobody on any of the
Debian documentation lists was even the slightest bit interested in
what I was trying to do (start at the beginning, to make sure that the
installation documentation was up to date and correct; for example the
man page for "sources.list", as of three weeks ago when I last checked,
is dated 2004 and *still* talks about obsolete repositories which do
not exist).  Eventually I walked away from it, and as you've probably
gathered the experience left a sour taste.  I'm afraid while some of
the more 'mainstream' packages like cups and lrpng need adoption then
something like Smokeping, which by its nature is useful to just a
minority of users, must expect to get in line.

In my view, for some of the packages available from Debian it would be
better if they did not offer them at all.  It isn't hard to install a
package from source, and if you can't even be sure the documentation
was written in this century and for the installation that you're
working on then it's very much easier to figure out what's going on if
you've installed from source than if you've installed a Debianized
package which doesn't work.  At least you'll have a fighting chance of
finding everything.  I can't help thinking that it would also be much
easier to keep a beginner-friendly guide to installation from source
up to date than it is to play catch-up with patches.

I suppose this is evidence of an incompatibility in philosophies. :)

--

73,
Ged.