[ic] Wanted: Support Group - opinions?

[Interchange user]

> It is pretty obvious to me that there needs to be a separation between
> the advanced technical discussions going on here and a mail group for
> those people wanting to ask more simple questions about say, setup
> issues. There are enough geeks around that enjoy helping people with
> simple problems that would allow a beginners group to function and be of
> real assistance. But in this group it is obviuosly uncool to help those
> new to Interchange, an ego phenomenon that takes place in a lot of
> programming support groups like this. Do I think it is going to happen.
> No, obviously the problem stems from whoever has this setup. It is I am
> sure an extension of whoever created this program yet failed to take the
> time to produce any setup documentation.



Personally, I have to sympathize somewhat with this guy because I can 
appreciate his frustration, although I don't agree entirely with what he has 
said.

Most of my questions to the list have been answered promptly and politely, 
and the answers have generally been very helpful. However, I have always read 
the docs (even if I couldn't make any sense of them) and searched the 
archives and support sites first, and tried to make my questions clear. Even 
when I have done this though, not all my problems have been solved, and 
unfortunately I have been left in the dark more than once because no-one 
could answer my question.

I have been trying to get an Interchange store together now for over two 
years, off and on, and as I'm doing this for someone else, I'm not the only 
one who's pissed that I haven't been able to get it finished yet. Of course, 
I've had to code a number of modifications so Interchange was by no means an 
out-of-the-box solution for me.

I have probably struggled more with learning Interchange than any language or 
software I have used before (including various flavors of ASM, and C), purely 
because of poor or non-existant documentation. I still know next to nothing 
about the innards of Interchange.

I recently brushed up on Perl, thanks to 'The Llama'; something that was 
necessary to make sense of the payment modules, however, I am still 
struggling to complete my module because there is no documented specification 
(that I have found) on things like passing form variables and return values. 
Having already posted to the list, it is now a matter of searching through 
the source to see what is actually going on behind the scenes, and had it not 
been for the other modules, I would be completely clueless.

Trying to decipher the source is not a practical solution for most people. I 
can just about get by thanks to the Llama and my background in C, but I still 
struggle. I also have 'The Camel' (which I have not had time to read yet), 
but even if you know your way around Perl, who wants to become an expert in 
the internal workings of Interchange when all you're really trying to do is 
get an online store setup?! Of course, it would save a great deal of time and 
frustration if my questions could have been answered on the list, but as 
someone pointed out, list members are not getting paid to sit there all day 
waiting for questions to answer.

Interchange is already a powerful and fully featured program, so I would much 
rather see work go into the documentation than into further development of 
the software. I haven't forgotten that this is free (both in terms of price 
and being open source) software, and I am very grateful for the efforts of 
the developers and supporters, but I think many would agree that 
priorities should be shifted towards the docs.