From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Oct 3 11:40:52 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (castles530.castles.com [208.214.165.94]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3E88F14D91 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 11:40:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dingo.cdrom.com (8.9.3/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA06882; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 11:33:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Message-Id: <199910031833.LAA06882@dingo.cdrom.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: wayne@crb-web.com Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List Subject: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...) In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 03 Oct 1999 13:28:13 EDT." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 11:33:24 -0700 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message