Re: Just wondering...
J.A.Serralheiro wrote:
> there is no reason for alarm. I have posted several messages in the
> past that also
> were disregarded for some reason. Later I realized they all were silly
> questions. I dont think your posts were silly ( as a matter of fact I have
> no idea about its contents ) but, surelly either people of this list didnt
> knew the awnser or they just didnt bother to reply. Its allways a matter
> of good will to explain things and you we must live with that. There isnt
> any kind of commitment when joining this list.
>
> regards
> J.A.Serralheiro
>
> On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Carlos Sousa wrote:
>
> > Have I been killfiled by ALL of you guys? :( 'Cause I may well be the
> > only guy that has posted 3 different questions to this list, since early
> > December, and hasn't received ANY reaction at all (not even a flame for
> > being off-topic or otherwise out of line). And there have been answers
> > to other posts on the same or close by topics.
> >
> > I don't think the RedHat lists would welcome questions / problems from
> > Debian users, so I'm starting to get worried...
Carlos, I don't recall your posts specifically, so this may not apply to
you, but allow me to offer a few tips that may help questions to find
answers more easily:
1. Make sure your subject line makes the topic clear in a few words.
Speaking only for myself, I often don't read messages when I can't
tell what they might concern (there is too much traffic on this list
for me to read everything, and I read several other lists as well). I
usually ignore messages with blank subjects, or "No subject", or
"?????", or generic subjects like "newbie question", or otherwise
imprecise subjects like "network problem" (as opposed to, say, "3C905
card not detected" or "WinNT client can't mount my Samba share").
2. Provide enough information. This generally means "as much as you can,
while keeping your total message size down to a few hundred lines". A
question like, "I can't get the installer to work, who can help me?"
is useless. Even "The installer crashes" isn't very good. We need to
know exactly what error message you saw (verbatim if at all
possible), and exactly what the program was doing at the time, and if
you can provide additional information from system logs, that's great
too. Basic system descriptions come in handy, as well: "Pentium
II/200, 64 MB RAM, running Debian 2.2r3 plus latest security updates"
would be a start, along with information about anything that is
obviously relevant (e.g. if X doesn't work, tell us what version of
XFree86 you have, and what video card and monitor). And if the
problem only occurs some of the time, try to give us some idea of
what makes the difference ("it works at the console but not when I'm
in an ssh session from another machine"). And tell us what you've
done on your own to try to fix or diagnose the problem, and what
results you got from those experiments.
3. Be polite. "This ^$#%$#^$^ ^$^$^ ^%$^%#@%# program %$#%$#% sucks!"
sometimes alienates people who might be able to help you figure out
how to fix things up. Vent your frustrations at the nearest wall
before writing to the list.
Craig
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