What's our audience - and how do we serve them best

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

As I see it, we've got several problems/issues :

1) what's our audience :
   ? newbies
   ? experienced
   ? nerds
   ? linux refugees
   each of these needs different kinds of handholding

2) how does one use macports in daily life ?
   we've got a section :
       https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto
   that we collectively ought try to promote better & bring up-to-date
   & yes - I'm guilty here as the sections I've authored haven't been
   kept updated :-( In my defence, I didn't experience much ethusiasm /
   support for my efforts, so I more-or-less gave up.
   There was/is a lot of negative put downs :
   - "that's not recommended"
   - "we don't do it that way"
   instead of saying : "that's interesting !? why does he find it
   necessary doing it that way ?!? could we incorporate his ideas &
   improve upon them ?!?"
   and generally no feedback at all.
   I've just taken a look at some of the HowTo section for setting up a
   MAMP - and it !really! needs improvement.

3) https://ports.macports.org/
   is almost useless. If one searches for eg php, the newest version is
   the third last from the bottom. All the other results are useless.

4) Public Relations
   As has been stated elsewhere, almost nobody knows about macports.
   Everybody references brew. I've just read a book on how to work with
   Terminal :
       https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484261705
   and the go-to package manager is brew. Some of the stuff mentioned
   installed with brew isn't present in macports, but those are minor
   issues.
   A course of action ought to be, that when one of us sees brew
   referenced as !the! way to install something, then to take contact
   and get the site to reference macports too.

5) what does our audiences want to use macports for ?
   ? webserver
   ? mailserver
   ? ...
   Those of us with diverse experience in different domains ought to
   describe their experiences in HowTo articles.

Yes - I do know that DucDuckGo exists.
But if you are at newbie, you'll need some (a lot of) hand-holding.
Referencing relevant books and web-pages in our HowTo section ought to
be standard best practise. I'm well aware, that one can't cover all
situations, but that's where references are of value. I don't know how
many books - both dead tree versions and pdf/ebook - I've read
conver-to-cover before even starting on a project.

There's also a tendency to just abandon problems and wait for upstream
to fix them instead of finding (temporary) workarounds. Try looking for
"php80-imagick" in the threads.

What I really, really, really like about macports is the option for
editing a port file to fix an issue before upstream handles it - eg I've
just had problems w/ youtube-dl not being the latest version, so I just
edited the portfile.

I'm willing to cooperate on stuff.

I've been using macs for my servers since the early 2000s
I started with compiling and installing apache, php & mysql from source
based upon ServerLogistics in 2004 and haven't looked back since. The
1st packet manager I used was fink, but when macports entered the scene,
I found macports to be better and jumped over.

I can do articles on setting up a MAMP server both simple and advanced.
Postfix & dovecot w/ MySQL integration is another subject.

-- 
Bjarne D Mathiesen
Korsør ; Danmark ; Europa
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