[Tb] Re: Tb Digest, Vol 1, Issue 3

I realize that certain matters of personality might seem tangentially
relevant, as they played some part in creating the environment that
made the creation of this mailinglist seem desirable. However, please
resist the temptation. Let's confine the discussion to the program,
interesting ways to use it, bugs and how to avoid them, related software,
and things like that.

I agree that the current user's manual is incomplete and inaccurate, but
the program is clearly under active development, and it must be difficult
for a small company to provide serious documentation for a moving
target. Writing good documentation is as big a task as writing code. For
me, the combination of the manual, the release notes, and a lot of experimentation
was enough to figure out how to use Tinderbox to do the things I hoped it could
do, which are nontrivial. These sources were supplemented by the official
website and very responsive replies to my emails to Eastgate. Experimentation
with the program, however, was really the only way to find out how it actually
worked. Often my first idea about how to do something, based on the manual,
didn't work, and I had to try things out before I found an alternative way.
If you don't have the patience or the temperament for this kind of trial
and error, then I would say that this program is not ready for you.
Received on Sat Sep 13 19:26:55 2003