Deafening silence

Well, I have my non-answer. This is a great way to repel experienced software managers and developers who might help with the documentation on the wiki, which desperately needs it, and maybe the code. And by ignoring our questions. It's also a great way to repel financial support. So long.

On 11/13/15, Alpine Linux forums wrote:
> Hi DonAllen,
>
> You have received a comment on: "Deafening silence"
>
> ----
> I'm sorry you got frustrated, and that noone was there to respond to you.
>
> Alpine Linux can be quite daunting at first, but be patient, we understand
> you, we've all be new at something.

I'm actually not having problems with the system itself (I've been
around awhile -- see below). That's not the issue. My problems have
been with the website, with reaching *anyone* knowledgeable, and with
the documentation (which I will try to help with if I continue to use
the system, which is becoming more likely now that radio silence has
been broken). On the latter point, I have installed Alpine with my own
partitioning scheme and also dual-boot with Windows. I will try (again
-- my first attempt vaporized inexplicably; could have been my error)
to add what I've learned to the wiki.

>
> These forums were put up so that people like you and me could help each
> other, and we hope that they will become more active as the community
> grows.

I understand. But it appears, both from the lack of response on the
forums and from the description of them on the Community page, that
people who know Alpine are not frequenting the forums. I think my
previous point is valid -- the extra link to the forums page can be
misleading and confusing and should be removed. Just consolidate all
forms of community -- IRC, mailing lists, forums -- in one and only
one place: Community.

Let me explain something about myself. I am a retired computer
scientist. I had an almost 50 year career in the field, at places like
MIT and BBN. At BBN, I ran the Tenex project (Tenex was by far the
most popular OS on the ArpaNet). I've done a *lot* of OS work on the
innards of CP/67, Tenex, TOPS-20 and later, BSD Unix and Mach,
specializing in scheduling, paging algorithms, and performance. I have
been running Linux since the early 1990s (Slackware got installed from
many, many floppies in those days :-). I have also done a lot of web
development and GUI work (I was president of the first web-based stock
brokerage). I am not telling you this to try to impress you, but
simply to point out that I am not a greenhorn. If your website
confuses me or misleads me, then I suggest that there is a problem
worth discussing.

>
> Stick around, you'll like what you see as you become more familiar with
> Alpine Linux, and in turn you might be able to help newcomers who post on
> these forums, and help the community grow.

>
> In the meantime, another good place to get help on Alpine Linux is the irc
> channel #alpine-linux

I tried that yesterday without success. Yes, I understand that irc is
real-time, a chat-room, and so it was probably the case that no one
was around when I looked in. This mailing list is starting to produce
results, and I will continue to use it.

I should mention that one of the primary reasons for my interest in
Alpine is the security emphasis. I worry that Torvalds, brilliant
though he is, is a bit too cavalier about security. He tends to view
security issues as bugs, and has made some well-known statements to
that effect. But the state of the security art has come a long way in
the 20+ years that he's been working on the kernel and I think that
he's remiss in not including some of the mitigations and other
hardening techniques in the main line of kernel development.
grsecurity shouldn't need to exist, in my opinion.

Anyway, thank you for your response. Much appreciated.

/Don