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发信人: jjksam (Linux,c/c++,java), 信区: Linux
标 题: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Thu Nov 29 06:15:37 2001), 转信
origin url:http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Copyright ? 2001 by Eric S. Raymond
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
Introduction
Before You Ask
When You Ask
How To Interpret Answers
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Questions Not To Ask
Good and Bad Questions
If You Can't Get An Answer
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical
questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the
difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to ask
questions in a way that is likely to get you a satisfactory answer.
The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems
and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be
here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful
to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us
develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed
or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, "Good question!" is a strong and
sincere compliment.
Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple questions with what
looks like hostility or arrogance. It sometimes looks like we're
reflexively rude to newbies and the ignorant. But this isn't really true.
What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling
to think or do their own homework before asking questions. People like that
are time sinks — they take without giving back, they waste time we could have
spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy
of an answer. We call people like this "losers" (and for historical reasons we
sometimes spell it "lusers").
We realize that there are many people who just want to use the software we
write, and have no interest in learning technical details. For most people,
a computer is merely a tool, a means to an end; they have more important
things to do and lives to live. We acknowledge that, and don't expect everyone
to take an interest in the technical matters that fascinate us. Nevertheless,
our style of answering questions is tuned for people who do take such an
interest and are willing to be active participants in problem-solving.
That's not going to change. Nor should it; if it did, we would become less
effective at the things we do best.
We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to answer
questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So we filter ruthlessly.
In particular, we throw away questions from people who appear to be losers in
order to spend our question-answering time more efficiently, on winners.
If you find this attitude obnoxious, condescending, or arrogant, check your
assumptions. We're not asking you to genuflect to us — in fact, most of us
would love nothing more than to deal with you as an equal and welcome you into
our culture, if you put in the effort required to make that possible. But
it's simply not efficient for us to try to help people who are not willing
to help themselves. If you can't live with this sort of discrimination, we
suggest you pay somebody for a commercial support contract instead of asking
hackers to personally donate help to you.
If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the losers.
You don't want to seem like one, either. The best way to get a rapid and
responsive answer is to ask it like a winner — to ask it like a person with
smarts, confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one
particular problem.
(Improvements to this guide are welcome. You can mail suggestions to
esr@thyrsus.com. Note however that this document is not intended to be a
general guide to netiquette, and I will generally reject suggestions that
are not specifically related to eliciting useful answers in a technical
forum.)
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Before You Ask
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a
website chat board, do the following:
Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things
first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and
wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing
these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated
that they can learn from the answers.
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty
answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that you have put
thought and effort into solving your problem before asking for help, the
more likely you are to actually get help.
Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is based on faulty
assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite likely to reply with a uselessly
literal answer while thinking "Stupid question...", and hoping that the
experience of getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will
teach you a lesson.
Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you aren't, after
all, paying for the service. You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by
asking a question that is substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking —
one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than
merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to help in
the process of developing the solution is a very good start. "Can someone
provide a pointer?", "What is my example missing?" and "Is there a site I
should have checked?" are more likely to get answered than "Please post the
exact procedure I should use." because you're making it clear that you're
truly willing to complete the process if someone can simply point you in the
right direction.
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When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be
ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:
post your question to a forum where it is off topic
post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical
questions are expected, or vice-versa
cross-post to too many different newsgroups
Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try
to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance.
You don't want this to happen to you.
In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are more likely to get
useful answers than equivalent questions to a private one. There are
multiple reasons for this. One is simply the size of the pool of potential
respondents. Another is the size of the audience; hackers would rather
answer questions that educate a lot of people than questions which only
serve a few.
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Whenever possible, use project mailing lists
When a project has a development mailing list, write to the mailing list,
not to individual developers, even if you believe that you know who can answer
your question best. Check the documentation of the project and its homepage
for the address of a project mailing list, and use it. There are several
good reasons for this policy:
Any question that's good enough to be asked of one developer will also be of
value to the whole group. Contrariwise, if you think that your question is too
dumb for a mailing list, it's not an excuse to harass individual developers.
Asking questions on the list distributes load between developers. The
individual developer (especially if he's the project leader) may be too busy
to answer your questions.
Most mailing lists are archived and the archives are indexed by search
engines. Somebody could find your question and the answer on the web instead
of asking it again in the list.
If certain questions are seen to be asked often, the developers can use that
information improve the documentation or the software itself to be less
confusing. But if those questions are asked in private, nobody has the
complete picture of what questions are asked most often.
If you cannot find a project's mailing list address, but only see the
address of the maintainer of the project, go ahead and write to the
maintainer. But even in that case, don't assume that the mailing list
doesn't exist. State in your e-mail that you tried and could not find the
appropriate mailing list. Also mention that you don't object to having your
message forwarded to other people. (Many people believe that private e-mail
should remain private, even if there is nothing secret in it. By allowing your
message to be forwarded you give your correspondent a choice about how to
handle your e-mail.)
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Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers
are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to
bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not
rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.
So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can't be
bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra
effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal — in
fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with
precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that
you're thinking and paying attention.
Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't confuse "its" with "it's" or
"loose" with "lose". Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting and
considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly less annoying, as it's difficult
to read. Alan Cox can get away with it, but you can't.)
More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you will very likely be
ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of
death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best,
a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.
If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your native language,
you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and grammar errors — but
no extra slack at all for laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that
difference). Also, unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write
in English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in languages they
don't understand, and English is the working language of the net. By writing
in English you minimize your chances that your question will be discarded
unread.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
If you make your question artificially hard to read, it is more likely to be
passed over in favor of one that isn't. So:
Send plain text mail, not HTML. (It's not hard to turn off HTML.)
MIME attachments are usually OK, but only if they are real content (such as an
attached source file or patch), and not merely boilerplate generated by
your mail client (such as another copy of your message).
Don't send mail in which entire paragraphs are single multiply-wrapped lines.
(This makes it too difficult to reply to just part of the message.) Assume
that your respondents will be reading mail on 80-character-wide text
displays and set your line wrap accordingly, to something less than 80.
Don't send MIME Quoted-Printable encoding to an English-language forum. This
encoding can be necessary when you're posting in a language ASCII doesn't
cover, but a lot of mail agents don't support it. When they break, all those
=20 glyphs scattered through the text are ugly and distracting.
Never, ever expect hackers to be able to read closed proprietary document
formats like Microsoft Word. Most hackers react to these about as well as
you would to having a pile of steaming pig manure dumped on your doorstep.
If you're sending mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft's stupid
"Smart Quotes" feature. This is so you avoid sprinkling garbage characters
through your mail.
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Use meaningful, specific subject headers
On mailing lists or newsgroups, the subject header is your golden
opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50 characters or
fewer. Don't waste it on babble like "Please help me" (let alone "PLEASE HELP
ME!!!!"; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don't try
to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a
super-concise problem description instead.
Stupid:
HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!
Smart:
XFree86 4.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset
If you ask a question in a reply, be sure to change the subject line to
indicate that you are asking a question. A Subject line that looks like "Re:
test" or "Re: new bug" is less likely to attract useful amounts of attention.
Also, pare quotes of previous messages to the minimum consistent with
cluing in new readers.
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Be precise and informative about your problem
Describe the symptoms of your problem or bug carefully and clearly.
Describe the environment in which it occurs (machine, OS, application,
whatever).
Describe the research you did to try and understand the problem before you
asked the question.
Describe the diagnostic steps you took to try and pin down the problem
yourself before you asked the question.
Describe any recent changes in your computer or software configuration that
might be relevant.
Do the best you can to anticipate the questions a hacker will ask, and to
answer them in advance in your request for help.
Simon Tatham has written an excellent essay entitled How to Report Bugs
Effectively. I strongly recommend that you read it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Volume is not precision
You need to be precise and informative. This end is not served by simply
dumping huge volumes of code or data into a help request. If you have a large,
complicated test case that is breaking a program, try to trim it and make
it as small as possible.
This is useful for at least three reasons. One: being seen to invest effort in
simplifying the question makes it more likely that you'll get an answer, Two:
simplifying the question makes it more likely you'll get a useful answer.
Three: In the process of refining your bug report, you may develop a fix or
workaround yourself.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
It's not useful to tell hackers what you think is causing your problem. (If
your diagnostic theories were such hot stuff, would you be consulting others
for help?) So, make sure you're telling them the raw symptoms of what goes
wrong, rather than your interpretations and theories. Let them do the
interpretation and diagnosis.
Stupid:
I'm getting back-to-back SIG11 errors on kernel compiles, and suspect a
hairline crack on one of the motherboard traces. What's the best way to
check for those?
Smart:
My home-built K6/233 on an FIC-PA2007 motherboard (VIA Apollo VP2 chipset)
with 256MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM starts getting frequent SIG11 errors about 20
minutes after power-on during the course of kernel compiles, but never in
the first 20 minutes. Rebooting doesn't restart the clock, but powering down
overnight does. Swapping out all RAM didn't help. The relevant part of a
typical compile session log follows.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
The most useful clues in figuring out something that went wrong often lie in
the events immediately prior. So, your account should describe precisely
what you did, and what the machine did, leading up to the blowup. In the
case of command-line processes, having a session log (e.g., using the script
utility) and quoting the relevant twenty or so lines is very useful.
If the program that blew up on you has diagnostic options (such as -v for
verbose), try to think carefully about selecting options that will add
useful debugging information to the transcript.
If your account ends up being long (more than about four paragraphs), it might
be useful to succinctly state the problem up top, then follow with the
chronological tale. That way, hackers will know what to watch for in reading
your account.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't ask people to reply by private email
Hackers believe solving problems should be a public, transparent process
during which a first try at an answer can and should be corrected if someone
more knowledgeable notices that it is incomplete or incorrect. Also, they
get some of their reward for being respondents from being seen to be competent
and knowledgeable by their peers.
When you ask for a private reply, you are disrupting both the process and
the reward. Don't do this. It's the respondent's choice whether to reply
privately — and if he does, it's usually because he thinks the question is
too ill-formed or obvious to be interesting to others.
There is one limited exception to this rule. If you think the question is such
that you are likely to get a lot of answers that are all pretty similar, then
the magic words are "email me and I'll summarize the answers for the group".
It is courteous to try and save the mailing list or newsgroup a flood of
substantially identical postings — but you have to keep the promise to
summarize.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Be explicit about the question you have
Open-ended questions tend to be perceived as open-ended time sinks. The people
most likely to be able to give you a useful answer are also the busiest
people (if only because they take on the most work themselves). People like
that are allergic to open-ended time sinks, thus they tend to be allergic to
open-ended questions.
You are more likely to get a useful response if you are explicit about what
you want respondents to do (provide pointers, send code, check your patch,
whatever). This will focus their effort and implicitly put an upper bound on
the time and energy a respondent has to put in to helping you. This is good.
To understand the world the experts live in, think of expertise as an abundant
resource and time to respond as a scarce one. The less of a time commitment
you implicitly ask for, the more likely you are to get an answer from
someone really good and really busy.
So it is useful to frame your question to minimize the time commitment
required for an expert to field it — but this is often not the same thing
as simplifying the question. Thus, for example, "Can you give me a pointer
to a good explanation of X?" is usually a smarter question than "Would you
explain X, please?". If you have some code that isn't working, it is usually
smarter to ask for someone to explain what's wrong with it than it is to ask
someone to fix it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't post homework questions
Hackers are good at spotting homework questions; most of us have done them
ourselves. Those questions are for you to work out, so that you will learn
from the experience. It is OK to ask for hints, but not for entire solutions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prune pointless queries
Resist the temptation to close your request for help with semantically-null
questions like "Can anyone help me?" or "Is there an answer?" First: if you've
written your problem description halfway competently, such tacked-on
questions are at best superfluous. Second: because they are superfluous,
hackers find them annoying — and are likely to return logically impeccable
but dismissive answers like "Yes, you can be helped" and "No, there is no help
for you."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Be courteous. Use "Please" and "Thanks in advance". Make it clear that you
appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.
To be honest, this isn't as important as (and cannot substitute for) being
grammatical, clear, precise and descriptive, avoiding proprietary formats
etc.; hackers in general would rather get somewhat brusque but technically
sharp bug reports than polite vagueness. (If this puzzles you, remember that
we value a question by what it teaches us.)
However, if you've got your technical ducks in a row, politeness does increase
your chances of getting a useful answer.
(We must note that the only serious objection we have received to this
how-to from veteran hackers is to the recommendation to use "Thanks in
advance". Some hackers feel this connotes an intention not to thank anybody
afterwards. Our recommendation is to do both.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Follow up with a brief note on the solution
Send a note after the problem has been solved to all who helped you; let
them know how it came out and thank them again for their help. If the
problem attracted general interest in a mailing list or newsgroup, it's
appropriate to post the followup there.
Your followup doesn't have to be long and involved; a simple "Howdy - it was a
failed network cable! Thanks, everyone. - Bill" would be better than nothing.
In fact, a short and sweet summary is better than a long dissertation
unless the solution has real technical depth. Say what action solved the
problem, but you need not replay the whole troubleshooting sequence.
Besides being courteous and informative, this sort of followup will help
others searching the archive of the mailing-list/newsgroup/forum to know
exactly which solution helped you and thus may also help them.
Last, and not least, this sort of followup helps everybody who assisted feel a
satisfying sense of closure about the problem. If you are not a techie or
hacker yourself, trust us that this feeling is very important to the gurus and
experts you tapped for help. Problem narratives that trail off into
unresolved nothingness are frustrating things; hackers itch to see them
resolved. The good karma that scratching that itch earns you will be very,
very helpful to you next time you need to pose a question.
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How To Interpret Answers
RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads
"RTFM", the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The Fucking Manual.
He is almost certainly right. Go read it.
RTFM has a younger relative. If you get a reply that reads "STFW", the
person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The Fucking Web. He is
almost certainly right. Go search it.
Often, the person sending either of these replies has the manual or the web
page with the information you need open, and is looking at it as he types.
These replies mean that he thinks (a) the information you need is easy to
find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the information than if
you have it spoon-fed to you.
You shouldn't be offended by this; by hacker standards, he is showing you a
rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should instead thank him
for his grandmotherly kindness.
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If you don't understand...
If you don't understand the answer, do not immediately bounce back a demand
for clarification. Use the same tools that you used to try and answer your
original question (manuals, FAQs, the Web, skilled friends) to understand
the answer. If you need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you have
learned.
For example, suppose I tell you: "It sounds like you've got a stuck zentry;
you'll need to clear it." Then:
Here's a bad followup question: "What's a zentry?"
Here's a good followup question: "OK, I read the man page and zentries are
only mentioned under the -z and -p switches. Neither of them says anything
about clearing zentries. Is it one of these or am I missing something here?"
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Dealing with rudeness
Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give
offence. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit
communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about
solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.
When you perceive rudeness, try to react calmly. If someone is really acting
out, it is very likely that a senior person on the list or newsgroup or
forum will call him or her on it. If that doesn't happen and you lose your
temper, it is likely that the person you lose it at was behaving within the
hacker community's norms and you will be considered at fault. This will hurt
your chances of getting the information or help you want.
On the other hand, you will occasionally run across rudeness and posturing
that is quite gratuitous. The flip-side of the above is that it is
acceptable form to slam real offenders quite hard, dissecting their
misbehavior with a sharp verbal scalpel. Be very, very sure of your ground
before you try this, however. The line between correcting an incivility and
starting a pointless flamewar is thin enough that hackers themselves not
infrequently blunder across it; if you are a newbie or an outsider, your
chances of avoiding such a blunder are low. If you're after information rather
than entertainment, it's better to keep your fingers off the keyboard than to
risk this.
(Some people assert that many hackers have a mild form of autism or Asperger's
Syndrome, and are actually missing some of the brain circuitry that
lubricates `normal' human social interaction. This may or may not be true.
If you are not a hacker yourself, it may help you cope with our eccentricities
if you think of us as being brain-damaged. Go right ahead. We won't care;
we like being whatever it is we are, and generally have a healthy skepticism
about clinical labels.)
In the next section, we'll talk about a different issue; the kind of
`rudeness' you'll see when you misbehave.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Odds are you'll screw up a few times on hacker community forums — in ways
detailed in this article, or similar. And you'll be told exactly how you
screwed up, possibly with colourful asides. In public.
When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience,
claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your
breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet
seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:
Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.
Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people
actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don't whine that all criticism
should have been conveyed via private mail: That's not how it works. Nor is it
useful to insist you've been personally insulted when someone comments that
one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser
attitudes.
There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided sense of
hyper-courtesy, participants are banned from posting any fault-finding with
another's posts, and told "Don't say anything if you're unwilling to help
the user." The resulting departure of clueful participants to elsewhere causes
them to descend into meaningless babble and become useless as technical
forums.
Exaggeratedly "friendly" (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.
Remember: When that hacker tells you that you've screwed up, and (no matter
how gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he's acting out of concern for
(1) you and (2) his community. It would be much easier for him to ignore you
and filter you out of his life. If you can't manage to be grateful, at least
have a little dignity, don't whine, and don't expect to be treated like a
fragile doll just because you're a newcomer with a theatrically hypersensitive
soul and delusions of entitlement.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Questions Not To Ask
Here are some classic stupid questions, and what hackers are thinking when
they don't answer them.
Q: Where can I find program X?
Q: My {program, configuration, SQL statement} doesn't work
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine. Can you help?
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you help?
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops privileges/read someone's email?
Q: Where can I find program X?
A: The same place I'd find it, fool — at the other end of a web search. Ghod,
doesn't everybody know how to use Google yet?
Q: My {program, configuration, SQL statement} doesn't work
A: This is not a question, and I'm not interested in playing Twenty
Questions to pry your actual question out of you — I have better things to
do. On seeing something like this, my reaction is normally of one of the
following:
do you have anything else to add to that?
oh, that's too bad, I hope you get it fixed.
and this has exactly what to do with me?
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine. Can you help?
A: Yes. Throw out that Microsoft trash and install Linux.
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you help?
A: No. I'd need hands-on access to your machine to troubleshoot this. Go ask
your local Linux user group for hands-on help. (You can find a list of user
groups here.)
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops privileges/read someone's email?
A: You're a lowlife for wanting to do such things and a moron for asking a
hacker to help you.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Good and Bad Questions
Finally, I'm going to illustrate how to ask questions in a smart way by
example; pairs of questions about the same problem, one asked in a stupid
way and one in a smart way.
Stupid: Where can I find out stuff about the Foonly Flurbamatic?
This question just begs for "STFW" as a reply.
Smart: I used Google to try to find "Foonly Flurbamatic 2600" on the Web,
but I got no useful hits. Does anyone know where I can find programming
information on this device?
This one has already STFWed, and sounds like he might have a real problem.
Stupid: I can't get the code from project foo to compile. Why is it broken?
He assumes that somebody else screwed up. Arrogant of him.
Smart: The code from project foo doesn't compile under Nulix version 6.2. I've
read the FAQ, but it doesn't have anything in it about Nulix-related
problems. Here's a transcript of my compilation attempt; is it something I
did?
He's specified the environment, he's read the FAQ, he's showing the error, and
and he's not assuming his problems are someone else's fault. This guy might
be worth some attention.
Stupid: I'm having problems with my motherboard. Can anybody help?
J. Random Hacker's response to this is likely to be "Right. Do you need
burping and diapering, too?" followed by a punch of the delete key.
Smart: I tried X, Y, and Z on the S2464 motherboard. When that didn't work,
I tried A, B, and C. Note the curious symptom when I tried C. Obviously the
florbish is grommicking, but the results aren't what one might expect. What
are the usual causes of grommicking on MP motherboards? Anybody got ideas
for more tests I can run to pin down the problem?
This person, on the other hand, seems worthy of an answer. He has exhibited
problem-solving intelligence rather than passively waiting for an answer to
drop from on high.
In the last question, notice the subtle but important difference between
demanding "Give me an answer" and "Please help me figure out what additional
diagnostics I can run to achieve enlightenment."
In fact, the form of that last question is closely based on a real incident
that happened in August 2001 on the linux-kernel mailing list. I (Eric) was
the one asking the question that time. I was seeing mysterious lockups on a
Tyan S2464 motherboard. The listmembers supplied the critical information I
needed to solve them.
By asking the question in the way I did, I gave people something to chew on; I
made it easy and attractive for them to get involved. I demonstrated
respect for my peers' ability and invited them to consult with me as a peer. I
also demonstrated respect for the value of their time by telling them the
blind alleys I had already run down.
Afterwards, when I thanked everyone and remarked how well the process had
worked, an lkml member observed that he thought it had worked not because
I'm a "name" on that list, but because I asked the question in the proper
form.
Hackers are in some ways a very ruthless meritocracy; I'm certain he was
right, and that if I had behaved like a sponge I would have been flamed or
ignored no matter who I was. His suggestion that I write up the whole incident
as an instruction to others led directly to the composition of this guide.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
If You Can't Get An Answer
If you can't get an answer, please don't take it personally that we don't feel
we can help you. Sometimes the members of the asked group may simply not know
the answer. No response is not the same as being ignored, though admittedly
it's hard to spot the difference from outside.
In general, simply re-posting your question is a bad idea. This will be seen
as pointlessly annoying.
There are other sources of help you can go to, often sources better adapted to
a novice's needs.
There are many online and local user groups who are enthusiasts about the
software, even though they may never have written any software themselves.
These groups often form so that people can help each other and help new
users.
There are also plenty of commercial companies you can contract with for help,
both large and small (Red Hat and LinuxCare are two of the best known;
there are many others). Don't be dismayed at the idea of having to pay for a
bit of help! After all, if your car engine blows a head gasket, chances are
you would take it to a repair shop and pay to get it fixed. Even if the
software didn't cost you anything, you can't expect that support will always
come for free.
For popular software like Linux, there are are at least 10,000 users per
developer. It's just not possible for one person to handle the support calls
from over 10,000 users. Remember that even if you have to pay for support, you
are still paying much less than if you had to buy the software as well (and
support for closed-source software is usually more expensive and less
competent than support for open-source software).
--
mm ☆__ __ __ __☆______ ______ __ __☆
/^( )^\ █ █ █/ █____ █__█ █∨█
\,(..),/ ▅__█ ▅__█ █\__ ▂__█ █ █ █ █
V~~V ▇▆▅▃▁I'm a bat. I'm very bad!^Q^_▃▄▆▇你好！^_^欢迎大家到linux?
※ 修改:·jjksam 於 Nov 29 06:18:09 修改本文·[FROM: 192.168.0.146]
※ 来源:·荔园晨风BBS站 bbs.szu.edu.cn·[FROM: 192.168.0.146]
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