From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Oct 3 15:48:39 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from www.crb-web.com (ns1.crb-web.com [209.70.120.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0145414D60 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:48:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wayne@crb.crb-web.com) Received: (qmail 6960 invoked by uid 1001); 3 Oct 1999 23:00:20 -0000 Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 19:00:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Wayne Cuddy Reply-To: wayne@crb-web.com Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List Subject: Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...) In-Reply-To: <199910031833.LAA06882@dingo.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Mike Smith wrote: > Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 11:33:24 -0700 > From: Mike Smith > To: wayne@crb-web.com > Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List > Subject: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...) > > > 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 Yes I am. > another flamewar about whether we should be opening a developers' > kindergarten? Oh. Ok if this is case where are the guidelines as to what is "worth the effort?" This determination is obviously relative. > > 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". You are right I jumped to learning about FreeBSD kernel development, which I don't get paid for in any way, so that I could have someone else do it... Try to be a little reasonable here, I would not be here if I did not want to learn. Which means doing my own work. I would be hard pressed to read the list for a day and not find a demeaning or wasteful comment from some of the developers on this list. So apparently some people do have time negative responses. Does a helpful response, even a "stupid" one take that much time? I did realize how busy you were. > > 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. This is absolutely correct and in many cases the most inefficient way to go. It is certainly helpful to answer a question that is on the tip of one's tongue rather than wading through lines of code especially if it is holding up the work of others. However you are correct definitive answers are in the code... all 1 million+ lines.. > > -- > \\ 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 > My sincere apologies if anyone feels that I am unnecessarily venting on this list. I will not spend any more time on this topic. Wayne To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message