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Re: Determining whether gnunet is connected


From: madmurphy
Subject: Re: Determining whether gnunet is connected
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2022 20:24:39 +0000

Hi Fungilife,

I agree that a lot of work must be done for encouraging users to dig further into the project. Since personally I get interested in something only when I can immediately use it and play with it – and only then, if it is broken I can even get interested in fixing it – my first concern has been that of ensuring that the Arch package worked out of the box. At that point I started to study the project further, and I found some of the answers only by asking the developers explicitly. However after I did get an answer I often transcribed it in the ArchWiki article. I am saying this because this project is complex and users come from different experiences, therefore documenting it can only be a collective effort. However you should not e afraid to ask when you want to find an answer.

Why GnuNet ?     No particular reason it seems.

What is wrong with the About page?

How?             Too complex, why do we need more networking?

I think the complexity is only in the lowest level of the code, which you deal with only if you are contributing to the core of the project. The higher levels (the framework's libraries) have some complexity too, but they are within average complexity range. I would say that using GNUnet libraries is more complicated than using GLib, but simpler than using libgit2. But that is my personal opinion. As for the user interface (the command line utilities), it can be buggy at times, but it should be easy to use and documented.

Who?             It says Gnu, so it must be Gnu people doing it, not easy to get involved with them.

I can answer only for myself. I got involved by simply maintaining the AUR package and sending patches from time to time. At some point my patches started to become numerous and they got exhausted of applying them, so they told me to apply them myself. It wasn't too hard :)


On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 12:49 PM Fungilife can be eternal <fungilife@protonmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Fungilife,
>
> What exactly are you having problems with? I maintain the AUR package, and I would like to fix it if there is a problem. What is the “crucial setup information” that is hidden? The AUR package should work out of the box by just launching `sudo systemctl start gnunet`.


No, this is what I am saying, it is just as easy on Arch getting the very latest version built and installed, it is not a debian old version issue, but since it is so easy in some distros to install everything, going back to the site you tend to skip the "Installation" documentation, which is much more than just installation, it is initial setup as well as "post-installation".

The rest of the documentation is way too theoretical and requires way too much study to make any sense to the uninitiated. My message was that it is not a package version problem as much as how the maze of documentation is arranged.

Again, GnuNet's first page needs:

Why GnuNet ?     No particular reason it seems.
How?             Too complex, why do we need more networking?
Who?             It says Gnu, so it must be Gnu people doing it, not easy to get involved with them.

Documentation can only be as effective as the motive it presents to read any further.




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