Rémi Gau
Greg KnaussI propose a day, once a quarter, where the team maintaining an open source project sits down with a new user and silently watches them try to compile it, using only the instructions on the website.
Yes, yes, I should be contributing. I know. I’m helping by being a dick.
The Duke of Fall 
@gknauss Helping by being a dick is a storied tradition in many open source projects, to be fair…
@valthonis “Helping” by being a dick.
Joe Rosensteel 🏳️🌈@gknauss Hey if they want to say the software is good software that people should use …
Mark Gardner@gknauss I prefer the term “gadfly”
GMRaphi@gknauss Or as the Catholics call it, "advocatus diaboli". 😈 Your service will be appreciated. If not in this life, then in the next hell. 🤪
cygenb0ck@gknauss schönes Wetter hier ... ^^
Chris Ferdinandi@gknauss OSS maintainers don’t owe anyone anything.
Ava 
@cferdinandi @gknauss Of course not — but if they want anyone to be able to use the software they spend so much time on, they need to know where the issues come up from actual users. And a lot of readmes telling people how to install/build OSS are not user-friendly, even for people that know what they’re doing.
@avakining @gknauss that is very very fair!
I think there are two types of OSS project: Those that people build for themselves, and then put on the Internet, just to be nice, and those that are clearly trying to amass as many users as possible.
I probably have different expectations for one versus the other.
Charlie@cferdinandi @avakining @gknauss
I think it may be possible there is a third type: people that are trying to help out a community with useful software or whatever, without trying to turn it into a "how many users can I get" job.
They are still interested in people being able to use it without having a post-grad degree in compiling random coders mess from github.
@BoscoZebra @avakining @gknauss That's still the first type, IMO.
Don't get me wrong—most tech docs suck! I just don't think complaining about free software from people is the look.
@cferdinandi @avakining @gknauss
That's fair, complaining is probably the entirely wrong approach.
I also think it's fair if someone says "this code will do X, here's how you assemble it and those instructions are unclear or wrong, it's not unreasonable to reach out and say "Hey man, documentation says to do X, I did it, this is what is happening, how do I fix that"
I also largely ignore social media/comments, so I may be missing some important context, are the comments awful?
@BoscoZebra @avakining @gknauss Social media comments on OSS generally aren't the issue. Tickets and demands for more free labor generally are.
William Pietri@williampietri @gknauss me providing free labor once does not obligate me to provide free labor again or on an ongoing basis
@cferdinandi @gknauss You say that with a tone of contradiction, but I never said otherwise.
@williampietri @gknauss "Neither do we owe any less" has a certain implication to it that I strongly disagree with.
Jacob Christian Munch-Andersen@cferdinandi @gknauss Principally I agree, I just don't ever want to use a project by someone who says that unprovoked.
@NohatCoder @gknauss I think the expectation that you should be able to find whatever OSS package you want, ready-to-use with support, for free, is a great failing of our industry.
Plenty of great "starting point code" sitting out there in projects that where released out-of-kindness by the creator who has zero interest in maintaining it.
The world would be worse off if they just kept it to themselves.
@cferdinandi @gknauss Ok, you got right to our disagreement. Starting point code is worthless. Someone else's half-baked attempt at doing something that wasn't quite what I needed in the first place is worthless. In some cases it may be negative value because my initial assessment was wrong, and trying to fix it simply cost time that could have been spent on my own code or searching for a better baseline.
"Someone else's half-baked attempt at doing something"
Oh the ego! Who says its half baked? Who says it's bad? Feature incomplete isn't "half baked".
Sounds like you'd be better off just coding everything yourself from scratch.
@cferdinandi @gknauss I code a lot of things from scratch, some of it end up as open source projects, and I would hate for those projects to waste other people's time.
Feature incomplete, half baked, no support. Call it what you will, I have never seen a project of that type that isn't a waste of time.
Have you got any examples? Ever found that piece of abandoned code that just needed a paint job?
@NohatCoder @gknauss Way to invalidate an entire genre of "I had this problem and this solved it for me and maybe you can adapt to your needs to" code shared on the internet.
GTFO out of my mentions, dude. I'm done.
@cferdinandi @gknauss Thanks for the block, I ask for one example and you can't provide, so GTFO to you too.
Don Whiteside@gknauss @lisamelton you can make them watch but you can’t make them care
@donw
In my experience it's a rare developer who doesn't care once they've watched.
@gknauss @lisamelton
In my experience it's a rare developer who doesn't care once they've watched.
@gknauss @lisamelton
Joe ❌👑@gknauss Provided that someone is paying the team for their time, and that someone determines that this is a good use of resources, sure. Otherwise, no.
Princess Sky 
@gknauss This is basically how it works at my job. I write code that makes perfect sense to me and only me, then my coworkers catch up and ask a million questions until it makes sense to everyone.
Alan Miller 
🇺🇦@gknauss and I propose that on that day they be paid their full hourly consulting rate for the entire day.
Chris Coleman@gknauss Compile? I’d be satisfied if the RetroArch people would just watch people try to use it.
Magnus Ahltorp
Kevin Karhan 
@gknauss +9001%
I know this issue...
And I do try to make it better...
https://github.com/OS-1337/OS1337
Dave Grossman appreciates you@gknauss “Installstice”
Randy Tayler@gknauss "What do you want, screenshots??"
Yes. Yes I do. In all things, great and small, show me a picture.
WesMason@gknauss
That's just lunacy.
That's just lunacy.
David Goldfield@gknauss And I propose that we have a regularly scheduled day when software developers meet with a blind screen reader user. The user has the opportunity to try out the newest features to see how accessible they are.
Bike Enby@gknauss First they have to watch them try to find the instructions, because nobody bothers updating COMPILE
Allen but one of the good ones@gknauss Honestly, I blame package management and mouse-driven repo browsing installation tools. Even the Linux nerds at my office look at me funny when I suggest just building a package myself with the options we need. The oldest and crustiest of them all assumes I'm talking about creating an .rpm file. If they can't find a project repo to add to their apt config, they're lost.
Building your own has become pretty niche.
Aidan@uastronomer @gknauss I'm a spack stan. Still relatively early days, and it doesn't get everything spot on, but it is definitely heading in the right direction
Lyall Ward@gknauss this customer research should be mandatory for any team providing internal tooling also.
Katie F@gknauss I have a fancy 80 page training manual for some corporate software and still I'm teaching new peeps "to clear that error select any other tab and then go back in and you'll be able to select a date"
If I could find the right IT guy I would love to walk through my work process so he could see all the pain points 😭
@gknauss +42 on that one. In other words, fully agree
Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷@gknauss Today you woke up and chose violence
toto@gknauss @Migueldeicaza goes for any project really. I try to make our teams to write readmes with exactly this standard. New engineers are encouraged to setup everything using the docs and if something is missing the docs should be amended.
Paul Grav
Legally Zoé@gknauss Compiling it? Now that's a tall order, I'd start with watching a new user just trying to *use* the thing 😆
Eugene Yokota
Gavin@gknauss in my last gig we sort of did this, new people joining the team were to try and set up using only the docs, and the first PR we expected was to improve those docs.
It worked really well.
It worked really well.
JESSE JANOWIAK HAS MOVED@gknauss Content Warning: Self Harm
Benjamin Reed@gknauss Conversely, there's Ben’s Law: Most open-source projects provide the right amount of documentation to end up with the number of users that are supportable. 😅
It would be great if someone tried installing it following only the instructions on the website, and then submitted a pull request with the fixes. We're barely holding on just maintaining things, pivoting to technical writing is _hard_, especially when everyone's busy fixing the most recent CVE.
blackcoat@gknauss Heh, this is part of our QA process when delivering bundles to clients. "install the bundle using the instructions in the bundle only"
Oblomov@gknauss we actually do it, although not exactly in those terms. It's really enlightening, not to talk about the things that pop up in heterogenous environments
bondolo@gknauss Even closed source projects should do this.
Steve Lhomme
James Morris@gknauss Certainly for projects which are well-funded.