[Mageia-discuss] mandrivausers.org

[Remco Rijnders]

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 10:48:02PM -0700, herman wrote:
> The Mandriva distribution has been dying by degrees over the last few
> years.  The forum activity drying up is a reflection of the reduction in
> the number of new users.

Agreed and agreed. That's why I'm happy to see this Mageia initiative
being taken; I think most of us on this list hope for this to turn into a
succesful story. Too long have things been lingering as the result of poor
designs and monetary problems.

> The news around the fork is bound to generate a new round of enthusiasm
> and new users should be encouraged.  

Agreed. That's why I think it's important that as long as the project
homepage sends new users to this list to discuss, that that is the
appropiate place for 'the official' discussion to take place. The last
thing you want is for there to be confusion on who runs the project and
what it's official home is. Even with the multitude of Mandriva sites it
was through the years not clear which homepage was the right one to use
and which was available for free or which only for club members. Same for
download locations, etc.

> New users of course like web forums, since it doesn't require any setup
> and a user with a problem sorely needs an easy to use web forum.

Perhaps for most new users this holds true. I personally am not a fan of
web fora, but I realise that is just a personal preference. Registering to
post on a forum or sending an email to a mailing list, both which require
you to confirm your email address, seem to be equally complicated
(simple!) to me.
 
> So, all new users coming here to figure out what the fork noise is all
> about, should be steered to the regular Mandriva downloads and
> mandrivausers.org.  They should not be discouraged from using Mandriva.

I'm not saying anyone should be discouraged from anything. Till the time
that Mageira actually releases something, I'm more than fine with people
opting to choose Mandriva.

With that said though, I don't think we've heard anything on the position
of Mandriva SA in all this yet. Perhaps they might be happy to work
together with Mageia and even rebase their own distribution on it in due
course, but they also might oppose this fork and fight it as much as they
can. I don't know which way things will turn out, but I think we should
not assume that everyone is fine with this, especially given the criticism
given to Mandriva SA and its management. Also, the fact that Mandriva did
not launch a community initiative like this themselves has me somewhat
wary as to their position.

Because of this, *if* we have to point users to a forum, I rather point
them to mageiausers.org than mandrivausers.org. (And thank you Paul for
registering this!). On that board we can then point users to the official
mageia homepage, as well as encourage them to take part in the discussions
on the board.

But I remain of the opinion that your original call to move all discussion
to the forum is premature at this point and that should such a call be
made, that it should be done by a mageia representative unless we want to
end up with 20 different fora who all want the discussion to take place on
their board.

Sincerely,

Remco
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