Re: [SyncEvolution] Getting the concepts clear (Was: Configuring a target)

Den 14. april 2014 01:00, skrev Emiliano Heyns: > I appreciate the extra info, but not so much the implication that I'm > hard to deal with. > Who's implying anything? I like to be able to say things as I see them, and it's annoying when doing so carries the risk of being misinterpreted all over the place. As I recall, when I got into SyncEvolution, I could understand the concepts fine without needing huge threads of 70 emails to discuss them. (At least, I don't *think* I needed more than 20 emails.) Hence, this thread amazes me, and I see no reason I shouldn't be allowed to be amazed. After all, I haven't even said why it amazes me. If it helps, I'll say that understanding human (or animal) communication, and how it both enables and limits the exchange of abstract ideas, has always been of some interest to me. To me, this thread seems to be a remarkable case of near complete breakdown of our methods for communicating ideas. I can't recall seeing anything like it, and there could be much to learn from it for everyone (including people not directly involved). That's also part of my reason for replying. I'm always trying to improve my own methods for communicating abstract ideas. Communication always involves at least two parties. When it breaks down, it is often easy to blame one of the parties, but it is rarely correct to do so. I almost never do. Generally, I am more interested in the properties of the communication itself, not the people involved. And from that perspective, there are actually two things about communication that can be amazing: 1) that it's possible for it to work really well 2) that it's possible for it to work really badly The documentation might be meaningful to people > deeply knowledgeable about syncevolution and its internals. For people > trying to get up to speed, they're a disaster. > No argument there. Damn right it's amazing > how much effort it takes to get the simplest of things figured out - and > not just Patrick's, mine too. > I'm sometimes amazed by Patrick, too. He's very patient (way more than I am), he almost always explains things thoroughly, he clearly knows what he's doing most of the time, and yet, over the years, I've seen several examples of his explanations missing the mark. Like everyone else, he's learning - and to that end, he often asks people for comments on how to explain these things better. Sadly, in general, people never give a proper answer to that. As a result, the documentation never improve much, and nobody knows what to do about it. After all, they're just fine for people who already know what's going on... It took what, weeks? for Graham to stumble upon the xmn idea. Without > that the documents don't make any kind of sense. Even to figure out what > counts as simple and complex is damn hard to figure out from the > documentation. > Yes, probably. Ambiguity about that is part of why I suspected the problem was that you were trying to understand concepts in the wrong way. Never in Patrick's explanations did I see a comprehensive treatise on the layers of SyncEvolution, i.e. what's fundamental and what's not. He usually kept explaining all the various unrelated details almost as if everything was interconnected in a intricate, flat structure, and so I started to wonder if that was part of the problem. My master's is philosophy. I am used to tying together complex concepts. > What I'm not used to is a mishmash of ambiguous terms, silent defaults > and position bound parameters, of which I should just hope that Patrick > and others don't make any typos, because that just puts me hopelessly > off track again. Most of all, I'm not used to having to tiptoe around > people's feelings while I'm trying to clarify ambiguities. > Whose feelings? Patrick is patient enough that he would probably be quite fine if you expressed yours. Of course, it's still best to try to keep it respectful and constructive... Bugger this for a lark. If syncevolution as a project thinks the > documents are fine as-is, and anyone that can't silently muddle through > them is dense, there's nothing useful I have to offer. > I don't know of anyone in the project that thinks the documents are fine as-is. But as mentioned, there are also nobody that knows how to improve them. I think everyone would think it was all worth it if it turns out that you could.