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

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Apr 5, 2021, at 17:16, Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:
>>
>> 1) what's our audience :
>>   ? newbies
>>   ? experienced
>>   ? nerds
>>   ? linux refugees
>>   each of these needs different kinds of handholding
>>
>> 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.
> 
> The php imagick module is not compatible with php 8 or later. It is not our job to make it so. Other than MacPorts base and supporting software, we do not develop the software. We provide software that has been developed by others and what the other developers choose to support or not is out of our control.
> 
> Anyone is welcome to contribute e.g. to the upstream php imagick project to make it php 8+ compatible. When that happens, we'll update to the new version of MacPorts.

I fully understand that macports as such doesn't have the job of fixing
this situation upstream - and that's also not what I'm asking for /
proposing. I'm proposing something like when a port is deprecated so one
gets a note about the situation.

We are back to who the audience is :

If it's "nerds" -or- "linux refugees" all is good and well - they are
able to find the fix/workaround on their own (as I did).

But if we want to cater to newbies, we'll (IMHO) have to provide some
way to tell them :
- why isn't php80-imagick available
- what's the (possible) workaround

And php80-imagick is only used as an example here.

-- 
Bjarne D Mathiesen
Korsør ; Danmark ; Europa
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