Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: Git Forum

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:53:39 -0700

Miklos Vajna <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 03:51:59PM -0600, Dill <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> I think a lot of users not only look at mailing lists but also seek
>> out forums for help.
>
> i never understood why this is good. maybe because there are no ads on
> this mailing list?
>
> yes, there are users who can't use a mail client so they use forums, but
> how one expects a user to learn git when he/she is not able to use a
> mail client? :)

That's Ok.  Not everybody has to subscribe to this mailing list to use
git.  Choice is fine.

I just have a suspicion that this community the "forum" announcement talks
about will be a completely different community from what is known as the
"Git community", whose definition is roughly "people who appear on this
mailing list and/or people who help others on #git at freenode".  The
people in "Git community" are generally helpful bunch of people when new
people have troubles, and any "Git community" will want to have people
like them --- otherwise the place will end up to be full of questions,
confusion, and wrong answers without much guidance and enlightenment.

But I suspect the people from existing "Git community" will not bother
visiting the new "forum" only to help out more new people.  There must be
something else that is compelling enough for them to visit there, for
example, "to hunt for ideas on what's lacking" (which, by the way, is the
reason I sometimes sit in #git channel, even though I am not an IRC
person).  But we already have the mailing list and #git for that, so
that's not what this new communication channel can offer us.  They need to
come up with something new to entice us.

In short, "forum" people need to build their own set of helpful experts if
they want to have "an excellent online reference ... to get help".  It
takes efforts to build a new community from scratch.  I am afraid that
they will be pretty much on their own.

But I have been wrong before.  Let's see how well the new "forum"
flourish (no, I do not forsee me visiting there).