Re: [tlug] Testing

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Hector Akamine writes:

 > Could it be that global,bigger sites like stack exchange and quora
 > that offer you "reputation points" and other stuff are luring away
 > people from groups such as TLUG? Like supermarkets killing small shops
 > (I think it's not a good analogy, but anyway)

I think that's actually a very good analogy.  The benefits of
supermarkets are fewer stockouts and wider variety, and that's exactly
what you get on sites like stackoverflow.  Your questions are more
likely to be answered, and the person who answers is more likely to be
very expert at the subject.  And our specialty (Japanese environments,
especially for foreigners) is no longer an exclusive selling point.
The big distros now do Japanese (and a lot more) quite well, so there
are fewer problems, and there are experts on the big fora who are as
good as anybody here.

Jim's point about Googling is good, too.  I don't know that I'd take
his statement about exposing ignorance too seriously, as I suspect the
instant gratification of Google is probably more important.

Finally, the big distros and conglomerate projects (like freedesktop
and GNU, offering many component projects but not a full-service OS
distro) now have pretty good bug-tracking systems and are usually
reasonably well-staffed, either with paid developers or passionate
volunteers.  I used to not bother with them, but it's gotten to the
point where it's useful to file bugs even with seriously arrogant
distros like Debian, and deciding package by package which ones aren't
worth coming back to.

Steve