On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 07:29:41PM -0400, Norbert Cartagena wrote:
<snip>
> Recently, I've been on the hunt for numerous sources of information
> recently for a number of projects I've been playing around with and have
> just realized the power of IRC, newsgroups, and mailing lists when it
> comes to this. That made me think about the following: Other than our
> marvelous SLUG list (and I can confidently say that, seeing as I
> subscribe to a number of other lists and can safely say that this is one
> of the best in almost any and all respects), what sources of information
> do you guys go to for Open Source and Free Software related issues? From
> mailing lists to newsgroups, IRC to carrier pigeons - whatever you can
> mention will be what I'm looking for; This question is not limited to
> Linux, so whatever floats your boat (from AbiWord to Zope development),
> go for it, I'd like to know.
Google. Any time I get a weird error message or something, I always
google it and come up with a pointer. Chances are, whatever it is has
been discussed on a list somewhere. Other than that, there's the Debian
user list (substitute with the list for your distro). However, it is
_extremely_ high volume, and they have a fair amount of flaming and
politics (List admins? We don't need no stinkin' list admins!). For
finding packages, I check freshmeat. For the latest Linux-only news, I
use lwn.net. Great analysis of the latest kernel tribulations, news on
distros, general news on Linux, etc.
Occasionally, there's a package I need to keep track of. Recently, there
have been some problems with spammers putting illegal header lines in
the headers of emails. Fetchmail was choking on these. So I got on the
fetchmail list and grabbed some patches. Two releases later, the problem
is all fixed. No chit-chat on that list though. Strictly tech talk on
fetchmail.
SVLUG used to have the worst list in the world for outright nastiness. I
haven't checked it lately.
And then there are O'Reilly books. I'm not really all that fond of them,
but they tend to be either the only books on some subjects, or the only
ones you can trust to be complete and comprehensive. I recently had to
study up on PHP, and the O'Reilly books were the best ones on the
shelves.
And then there are man pages. ;-}
Paul
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