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Date:      Sun, 03 Oct 1999 11:33:24 -0700
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        wayne@crb-web.com
Cc:        FreeBSD Hackers List <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
Message-ID:  <199910031833.LAA06882@dingo.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 03 Oct 1999 13:28:13 EDT." <Pine.LNX.4.10.9910031115460.4169-100000@crb.crb-web.com> 

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> As a newbie to kernel programming, who might need a little help and guidance,
> the above is certainly true.  I can attest to the fact that I have a certain
> reluctance to post some of my questions to this list(hackers). I  have posted
> some in the past, many of which have gone unanswered, to which I know answers
> exists.  This is certainly not the case in all situations.

Are you willing to accept that you may have been judged "not worth the 
effort" on the content of your questions, or are we going to have 
another flamewar about whether we should be opening a developers' 
kindergarten?

There is no sense in wasting the time of one informed developer to help 
one uninformed developer; this is a bad tradeoff unless the uninformed
developer is showing signs of promise.  The only way to assess this is 
to look at the questions they ask and the context they're asking them 
from.  Nobody wants to answer one obvious question if there's any 
chance at all that the questioner will latch onto them and demand 
answers for dozens more - this isn't "helping someone", it's "doing 
their work for free".

So, regardless of whether you've asked a question or not, you need to 
understand that the onus rests solely on yourself to pursue the answer. 
They're all there in the code, where everyone else that you're asking 
has already found them.

-- 
\\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\  Mike Smith
\\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself,  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime.             \\  msmith@cdrom.com




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