Gaining a foundation level of knowledge about a particular open source application can be difficult sometimes. Many of the apps with large client bases have a decent amount of resources in print and on the web that you can glean needed information from, but smaller or fresher applications are more difficult - especially when the name of the application isn't entirely unique.
There are a few resources that should always be checked though. Here's a list of a few:
Mailing Lists
I'm always wary of subscribing to mailing lists and handing over my email address to another set of spammers. It's especially hard to keep up with a list that is associated with a piece of software that garners only peripheral attention from you. But you will find that mailing lists are more popular and useful than any other form of communication. I'm sure this is in part due to the fact that the resources for publishing a mailing list are minuscule in comparison to most other forms of communication. If you can't bring yourself to subscribe, check out sites like The Mail Archive, Nabble, Gossamer, or mArc. You really do get the best info by subscribing and perusing the messages on a regular basis though.IRC
I remember IRC from way back in my hacker days - back before there was a world wide web, domains would cost you 70 bucks a year, and archie and gopher ruled the internet. It's basically a chat room kind of interface. You can access IRC with Trillian pretty easily, and there are a ton of freeware clients out there. If there's no official channel, hop on a popular server or two and see if one exists.Support
Putting in a support request via Sourceforge or whatever the support interface is will likely gain the attention of the developers. It also lets them know that somebody is interested in their work. The worst that could happen is you get ignored. The best that could happen is that a developer or another end user answers your questions. It's worth a shot, and even if there is a history of ignored requests, you may find that your question does get some attention.Google Groups
Google Groups is a great place for information on just about any topic. A lot of times questions get asked and answered on peripheral newsgroups - for instance, you might see a few answers about using command line curl in the perl or php newsgroups. Technical information from newsgroups is usually much better than the summary pages you'll find on the web. It's also great to be able to follow a question through a series of attempted resolutions to gain knowledge of how the internals work.So there you have it. Just because a dedicated web forum doesn't exist, and there's no Wiki or PDF to download, doesn't mean that you can't get the information you want and need easily. If you see a lack of information on a particular subject, put up your own web page. Even if you just document the problems that you're having, at least there's something out there.
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