Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Wednesday 17 November 2004 05:10 pm, Sid Boyce wrote:
I don't think we have to change one thing, we are doing just fine the way things are. Regards
I think you're right.... but it would be great if someone would come up with a short document (so it can be sent by email) that would describe the best way for a newbie to ask a question. Maybe that's all that's lacking.
I know I get pretty pee'd when someone asks an out-of-the-blue question without providing a lick of information and then expects an answer. Maybe by replying (politely) to such questions with a paragraph or two of 'instructions on asking a question' would save a lot of flames and also some RTFM answers. And I think the newbies would appreciate it.
And we'll get Pat S. to add a paragraph about not top-posting and triming quotes and trimming sigs and...... (only partly kidding.)
Granted, a person sometimes doesn't know what exactly to provide in framing a question, so they can give you some idea of what they are experiencing. With that information, you can ask them to provide specifics from log messages, config files and the output of commands, you then have something solid with which to work. In a few instances, some guys will not provide you with what you asked for, but they will forever ask for help as though you've got the error reported and instantly you should know the fix and as you know someone simply reporting that they can't connect to the internet tells you many things can stop them, so without details like ifconfig, route -n, /etc/resolv.conf and physical connections, you don't have a clue either. Top-posting --- That's past me. Ideally when following a long thread, I'm usually up to speed with what's gone before, so I'm only interested in the latest, I don't need to read the earlier stuff. If the latest is at the bottom, I scroll down to where it is. Admittedly if you come to look at a long thread for the first time, bottom posting makes sense and the previous quotes are relevant. If you follow long threads on the kernel mailing list, you will see top posting almost exclusively, those guys get hundreds of postings a day and have fully taken on board the problem, so they only want to see what's resulted from the previous situation/suggestions/patches. In some cases they will bottom post, but the previous stuff is usually trimmed to a few lines, e.g. ----------------------------------------------------------- On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 03:36:30PM -0800, Randy.Dunlap wrote:
static int __init parport_init_mode_setup(char *str) {
Yes, I'm familiar with that, but I made a patch against current top of tree.
I don't understand. Will you send another patch to fix the prototype? Andries -------------------------------------------------------------- Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer =====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====