fronty wrote:~ wrote:The same could be said for any other topic (including comp.os.*).
Not exactly. Saying that about for example operating system development would be like saying "you should abandon your working established community and join some other community". In my opinion that's radically different to saying "you shouldn't try to forcefully create a new community instead of joining old, well established and respected community".
After all, the quality and effectiveness of the material of a community so that beginners can progress steadily depends on the capabilities of every individual contributing to that community and, more importantly, the amount of knowledge that is actually shared in an accessible and complete way.
Yes, it seems that improving the quality of the questions and sometimes the answers, or at least increasing the attempts to post threads about generic and reusable information of all kinds in a rich and practical way should be enough as a new starting point to better satisfy the technical needs that are left behind in the most publicly accessible parts of communities like this.
There are plenty of options and indeed they don't involve forcing things. It's fine if no new communities are created, since there is the "General Programming" section, topics that fit perfectly in other sections, and a lot of other places to learn from, as well as a few books and tutorials.
It's just that in the end, regardless of the topics, what would be nice would be to discuss and document more of the
useful things (for the users) that can be done with an OS.
I see that without such discussions, which is already difficult enough everywhere, there is usually no room to properly talk about a lot of things involved, stay on topic, and have people actually contribute to a discussion. I see that only a very few OS projects have become advanced here, but for the rest things seem to have become stalled (the fact that almost anything that has been implemented in such projects has been discussed clearly here or somewhere else could be regarded as a warning that something is increasingly lacking). So it would seem that so many resources wouldn't make so much sense after all as would have been intended for the majority if there is no proper discussion/disclosure of topics beyond the basics, to make more unusual things considerably more familiar.
And if the projects get abandoned and no knowledge is documented for all of the tiny advanced bits, there is really not very much benefit after the projects and its developers disappear.
There must be some other ways to encourage talking about advanced topics in an effective way that could be understood gradually, with heavy help, be it direct or from documentation, because right now it's all about finding and understanding the more advanced things 100% virtually by oneself.
There is the Wiki, this forum, the IRC chat, there are books, tutorials, Usenet groups, sites like Stack Overflow, but what is lacking is the practical exposure to explanations that stem from the real world, what has already been done, big and small, and that take them apart more clearly. Regular asking/answering almost never solves it properly because of poor questions or too specific to a particular implementation/problem/bug. It seems to happen everywhere that there is a discussion/questions board.
The only thing that occurs to me for that, but not necessarily the best that there could be done, is to define a practical goal/purpose, take a little piece (for a demonstration program), and explain it so it is complete in itself, and taken step by step initially ignoring everything that doesn't apply for that particular purpose (instead of relying on lots of resources and full, raw standards and specifications, having everyone find out the same things from scratch and not documenting at least a clear enough general progression of what it took for it to be done).