[Buildroot] suggestion?

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[jerry at chordia.co.uk]

How about a buildroot-user list? Or is there a better place to go for help
using BR as opposed to development? Thanks.

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[Buildroot] suggestion?

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello Jerry,

On Wed, 27 Jan 2016 12:02:53 -0000, jerry at chordia.co.uk wrote:

> How about a buildroot-user list? Or is there a better place to go for help
> using BR as opposed to development? Thanks.

We had this discussion a few times during the past Buildroot meetings,
and our position is that in terms of Buildroot, the boundary between
"user" and "developer" is clearly not as clear-cut as for many other
programs. Indeed, a user very often needs to add his own packages
(either to package his own custom applications/libraries, or to package
open-source applications/libraries that are not yet in Buildroot),
which makes this user almost immediately a developer.

For this reason, we've chosen to keep the entire discussions on one
list. So feel free to ask your user-level questions on this list.

We also have an IRC channel, #buildroot on Freenode, on which you can
very often get live help. Many of the participants are based in Europe,
but I see you're in the UK, so in terms of timezone it should match
pretty well.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

On Wed, 27 Jan 2016, jerry at chordia.co.uk wrote:

> Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 12:02:53 -0000
> From: jerry at chordia.co.uk
> To: buildroot at busybox.net
> Subject: [Buildroot] suggestion?
> 
> 
> How about a buildroot-user list? Or is there a better place to go for help using BR as opposed to development? Thanks.

Hi Jerry,
My suggestions is that you ask on

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask

using the new "buildroot" tag rather than asking on this list.

The reasons are:

1. The SE format is a much better format for Q&A than a mailing list
2. SE has much better exposure than this list
3. Newbie questions have historically gotten short shrift on this list

  - yba


-- 
  9590 8E58 D30D 1660 C349  673D B205 4FC4 B8F5 B7F9  ~. .~  Tk Open Systems
=}-------- Jonathan Ben-Avraham ("yba") ----------ooO--U--Ooo------------{=
mailto:yba at tkos.co.il tel:+972.52.486.3386 http://tkos.co.il skype:benavrhm

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[jerry at chordia.co.uk]

Hi Jonathan

> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask
> using the new "buildroot" tag rather than asking on this list.

Is there much of a BR community on SO? I guess it works for those mad to
build rep :)

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

On Wed, 27 Jan 2016 13:05:03 -0000, jerry at chordia.co.uk wrote:

> > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask
> > using the new "buildroot" tag rather than asking on this list.
> 
> Is there much of a BR community on SO? I guess it works for those mad to
> build rep :)

Unlike what Jonathan said, I wouldn't really suggest to rely on
Stackoverflow. While Stackoverflow was really great at the beginning,
there are now tons of people giving completely incorrect and invalid
answers. On the Buildroot topic fortunately, a few of the core
developers/contributors are monitoring the "buildroot" tag, so they are
giving good answers, but I've also seen other answers that were
completely wrong. Arnout Vandecappelle and Luca Ceresoli are
particularly active at answering Buildroot questions on Stackoverflow.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[jerry at chordia.co.uk]

Hi Thomas

 
> Unlike what Jonathan said, I wouldn't really suggest to rely on
Stackoverflow.
> While Stackoverflow was really great at the beginning, there are now tons
of
> people giving completely incorrect and invalid answers. On the Buildroot
> topic fortunately, a few of the core developers/contributors are
monitoring
> the "buildroot" tag, so they are giving good answers, but I've also seen
other
> answers that were completely wrong. Arnout Vandecappelle and Luca
> Ceresoli are particularly active at answering Buildroot questions on
> Stackoverflow.
 
OK. That is good to know. 

I'd agree with your more general observations about SO though. Quality
control has failed badly.

Let me try and experiment or two :)

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[Arnout Vandecappelle]

On 27-01-16 14:38, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Wed, 27 Jan 2016 13:05:03 -0000, jerry at chordia.co.uk wrote:
> 
>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask
>>> using the new "buildroot" tag rather than asking on this list.
>>
>> Is there much of a BR community on SO? I guess it works for those mad to
>> build rep :)
> 
> Unlike what Jonathan said, I wouldn't really suggest to rely on
> Stackoverflow. While Stackoverflow was really great at the beginning,
> there are now tons of people giving completely incorrect and invalid
> answers. On the Buildroot topic fortunately, a few of the core
> developers/contributors are monitoring the "buildroot" tag, so they are
> giving good answers, but I've also seen other answers that were
> completely wrong. Arnout Vandecappelle and Luca Ceresoli are
> particularly active at answering Buildroot questions on Stackoverflow.

 Begging to differ here, I think the quality of the answers on Stackoverflow is
pretty good. At least, the answers that show up in search results. IMHO the
voting mechanism does work pretty well.

 For the buildroot tag, many of the questions are indeed better put on SO
because they are not strictly buildroot-specific.

 The main problem is that many questions are not appropriate SO questions but
rather debugging help. And that requires a threaded conversation, which doesn't
work well at all on SO.


 Regards,
 Arnout

-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
G.Geenslaan 9, 3001 Leuven, Belgium           BE 872 984 063 RPR Leuven
LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoutvandecappelle
GPG fingerprint:  7493 020B C7E3 8618 8DEC 222C 82EB F404 F9AC 0DDF

[Buildroot] suggestion?

[jerry at chordia.co.uk]

Hello Arnout

> 
>  Begging to differ here, I think the quality of the answers on
Stackoverflow is
> pretty good. At least, the answers that show up in search results. IMHO
the
> voting mechanism does work pretty well.
> 
>  For the buildroot tag, many of the questions are indeed better put on SO
> because they are not strictly buildroot-specific.
> 
>  The main problem is that many questions are not appropriate SO questions
> but rather debugging help. And that requires a threaded conversation,
which
> doesn't work well at all on SO.

The key thing is that there needs to be a place where people can get
reasonable answers to reasonable questions. 

I took up Thomas' suggestion and posted in this list earlier. I suspect that
simply got lost in the noise. 

Hence the BR-user proposal. 

I will try the SO experiment. 

The point about 'discoverability' is crucial. Does anyone index IRC?