What question scope will the *nix community cover? - *nix

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Top Answer

PeterVandivier

## Keep it broad

As a U&L beginner, I find it a little difficult to contribute what _should_ or _should not_ be "in-scope" by virtue of the fact that I don't know what things exist to exclude or include. 

For the near future though, I think the community is likely to be small enough and disciplined enough to keep the questions asked here **well-constructed**. For this reason, I don't think creating a list of "off-topic" items is optimal.

For example: it's en vogue among the folks I work with to poo-poo powershell on nix (see also: here); but I use it a lot in my day-to-day on both MacOS & Centos. For this usage, I don't have a whole lot I'd ask here instead of [the dedicated Powershell community][1] I participate in; but I can see needing a place to ask about configuring a FreeBSD installation to use `pwsh` when that becomes an option. If both FreeBSD & powershell are deemed strictly off-topic on this U&L network then I can easily see why that would be a valid choice; but I will - as they say - [has a sad][2].

If in the future sub-network fragmentation is deemed to be appropriate, then perhaps a tag sweep could be done to migrate away content like what I'm likely to generate en masse; but for now I vote enthusiastically to keep the scope broad & inclusive and trust the community to keep our content suitably tidy.

[1]: https://powershell.slack.com
[2]: http://m.quickmeme.com/img/bd/bdc0aa00e03dd5aea3e9955d55db98e72404514d1b930b8a7746f5b2014a7d39.jpg

Answer #2

holmanb

the users that I expect to see in this community come in many shapes and sizes:

- server / network admins
- software / hardware developers
- desktop users
- smartphone users (android/postmarket/etc)
- "makers" (Raspberry Pi/beaglebone/etc)

this list of potential users will likely bring with them a wide range of questions, from [containers](docker.com) and [orchestration](kubernetes.io) to [desktops](kde.org) and [\*nix specific applications](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell), to [configuring network settings](
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_configuration/Wireless) and using system [text editors](https://www.vim.org/) and administering systems using scripting languages ([general purpose](https://www.python.org) or [shell](
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/What-is-Bash_003f.html)).

I think that all of the above topics have a place in this community currently.

The challenging part will be saying "topic X belong here".  Saying that a topic doesn't belong in a community is to say that either 1. topic X doesn't currently belong on this site, or 2. topic X belongs in a different community. To avoid fragmenting the community too much too soon, I would err on the side of inclusion until sufficient user base is achieved.

Powershell is my first proper scripting language and I’ve only really been using it for a few years, but I’m very much a fanboy. Tbh I never knew about monad until I googled it just now. I really do encourage you to play with it again if you have an opportunity to do so. V6 is amaaaazing and v7 is up soon

Oh! Comments are a chatroom sorted by time? There's no nesting or voting comments up and down? I like the idea of people having conversations on tangents easily. But, I'll miss the succinct and relevant comments under an answer.

My biggest problem with PowerShell was that, in the early days, the proponents kept trying to compare it to "the shell in UNIX", but ultimately they seemed to be misinformed. They knew ksh and POSIX sh, but not modern bash. I used to read Microsoft's forums to learn more about the advantages of PowerShell, but eventually quit because it became just them saying things, then me responding with an example of how I've been doing the same thing in GNU bash for years. I know PowerShell has abilites Bash doesn't — I've read the book — but it was disheartening to just see a bunch of malarkey being promoted as the cool new thing.

I loved Monad, before marketing renamed it PowerShell. I still have my Monad book. You can tell from my notes scribbled throughout that I found the concepts thought provoking, even when I disagreed.

It might even be helpful to have a tag for "Looks Off-topic To Me, but anyone here who wants to take a shot at answering it is free to do so". When a moderator adds that to a question, it'd move it to the bottom of the queue so answerers won't see it by default.

I think by starting broad and only becoming more specific as necessary, we can avoid the problem of StackExchange where it would seem unfriendly. Instead of marking questions off-topic and closing them, we should try to distinguish them by tag.

To me, if the scope is too broad, I worry I'll login and see a whole bunch of questions that are not in my wheelhouse and I'll just quit, discouraged. (Of course, this could be helped if I could setup regexes to filter my default view of the queue.)

less about explicitly saying "_you should ask powershell questions here_" & more a lighthearted jab at the "_no powershell on nix_" sentiment. i get a lot of that from the guys at work despite the fact that i've been using a bunch of pwsh as helper scripts on my macbook & a few centos instances

i mean... i'm a huuuuuge u&l noob (only been on if for like 8 months), but off hand, i can imagine wanting to ask details about getting powershell working on FreeBSD (been reading conflicting things about the state of the dotnet port to FreeBSD every time i bother to look it up)

@holmanb It will be relatively easy here (and much easier than it is for SE), to carve out a tag or a subset of questions into a new community — that might be some support for 'erring on the side of inclusion' as you suggest, even though it isn't my instinct.

2 Answers