[horde] Re: response to your continued berating

[Jeff Warnica]

Somewhere on the horde pages it shold point to:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Possibly, Mailman should be configured to spit that out as an
autoresponce to first time posters. With a disclamer that 'you will be
ignored if you dont seem to have read, and followed the smart question
HOWTO'

To the horde developement community: I feel your pain. I shared in it a
bit responding to one of those 'what IMAP server to use..." questions. I
suspect that the vast majority of Horde admins have their own tech
support forums that they must monitor to some extent... most of 'us'
feel your pain. Personaly, I assume that people asking questions about
Horde are sysadmins, and thus should be smart. Even if a user is having
problems with Horde that may require the advice of a Horde developer to
fix, that should be sent through the local admin.

As an out of work Unix/Linux geek, I am especially frustrated by people
who are trying to do things clearly beyond their grasp, tasks that
someone like me should be getting paid to do. Which is not to say that I
think Horde (or anything else) should be intentionaly made difficult to
use, just that things are. But sometimes I think that ease-of-admin is a
problem and things should be made hard: even if things are 'working'
they are not necessaraly configured correctly with stability, security,
and other non-obvious, and very non-trivial options done right.

Since I happen to be writing, I am frustrated at the 3.0 release cycle.
I understand that many 'traditional' horde libs are being riped out and
made generic PEAR modules, and that not much in the way of 'features'
are being worked on. And that untill the PEAR conversion is compleate,
not even an alpha will be released. But there isnt a good TODO, nor even
a vague guess ('an alpha will appear in summer') at a roadmap.