[gentoo-dev] Troubleshooters for Gentoo

[Maurice van der Pot]

Hi,

I've noticed in the past that a lot of people come to irc with problems
in some area (say networking) that are easy to solve just by first
asking a number of questions to identify the problem and then providing
the solution.

I've always liked the way Microsoft put these troubleshooters in their
help files. While the content of Microsoft's troubleshooters probably 
never really helped anyone, the format of a troubleshooter is in my 
opinion one of the best ways to help people solve their own problems.

Now I've hacked up a program that can create a troubleshooter from
specifications of questions and problems and their dependencies, but I'd
need to have some decent content to really make it useful for other
people.

I think having a couple of Gentoo-specific troubleshooters would be a
great resource for new users (not just new to Gentoo, but new to Linux).

I have a couple of questions:

1) Does this sound like a good idea?

2) Does anyone feel like pouring his/her troubleshooting skills into
   content for my program?

The program is still very immature (I skipped a lot of things that
weren't absolutely necessary for the program to show what it can do),
but that'll be fixed.

When given proper input, it generates HTML files that you can click 
through and that will hopefully lead you to (a solution to) your problem.
It has some sample content to show the format.

Maurice.


http://griffon26.kfk4ever.com/~griffon26/troubleshooter-0.0.2.tar.bz2
43f0042c802ad5ddcdf2a4db671c41c8 *troubleshooter-0.0.2.tar.bz2

-- 
Maurice van der Pot

Gentoo Linux Developer   griffon26@g.o     http://www.gentoo.org
Creator of BiteMe!       griffon26@××××××××.com   http://www.kfk4ever.com