At 15:24 2002-06-13 -0400, Robert Adkins did say:
And this is what you don't know about me:
This has what bearing on the matter at hand? Does it give you the
privledge to call others rude for taking the time to answer your
question? Does it mean that everyone who doesn't dedicate their life to
helping others should just STFU? I would suggest that you don't know the
countless hours I've invested into assisting others here - writing their
scripts for them, debugging them, taking their scripts and setting up a
test environ on one of my hosts and running it so that I could show them a
line from the verbose log, explaining why some flag doesn't apply, or why
some other flag should be used, etc. On another list I'm on, I've even
disassembled parts of my cars to take pictures or measurements for someone
to answer their questions.
My time. For which I am not compensated - heck, nobody even brings over a
beer, as they surely must at your F2F gatherings.
I'm a very giving person -- to those willing to learn and spend at least an
equal amount of THEIR time doing the work which is for their benefit.
If you want to join this list and promptly answer all the questions that
come through here, even the ones referred to in the manual, then welcome
aboard. With all the giving you do elsewhere, I'm sure you can make the
time to give some of yourself here.
Keep in mind that if you answer everything in the manual rather than ever
directing people to the manual, then they WON'T read the manual, they'll
just post their question.
Perhaps there should be a "procmail-newusers" list in addition to the
regular procmail list? Of course, people would take grave offence at being
directed to use the procmail-newusers list when asking questions that are
answered in the manpages, but such is life.
Even if it meant answering the same question over and over. For each time
someone new asks a question that has been asked before, it is a new
question to them.
Thus was born the FAQ. It is not a sin to direct someone to refer to the
FAQ. It is not rude to direct someone to the FAQ.
It is rude to tell someone to stuff it for advising you to read the FAQ
(which, FTR, I haven't done in this thread, yet you choose to slam me for it).
Berating them for having not read every FAQ, cryptic
note, man page, archive is very unproductive. Berating a newbie is just
Advising someone to refer to the available documentation isn't berating
them. Please cite and instance where I called someone names in the process
of advising them to read the documentation. Please cite where I did this
in my reply to you for that matter.
For someone who has the above opinion, I find it interesting that
you would choose to berate someone for posting a "cryptic recipe" in
response to a query of yours rather than politely requesting a
point-by-point explanation of the function of their recipe.
Hopefully their explanation is correct, since if you implement something
you don't understand, on the basis of the advise of someone you do not
know, you could risk the security and integrity of your own
system. Hopefully, they're shooting straight with you.
documentation that someone of Mr. Straw's technical skill is simply
incomprehensible to people new to the technical mailing list.
That doesn't mean you should berate someone for providing a direct answer
to a query, or of sharing a technial opinion.
It has been long held that the appropriate thing to do when joining a
mailing list or usenet discussion group is to seek out the FAQ and read it.
In brief, I find your attack extreme, unfair, and inappropriate.
Which is exactly how I found Mr. Straw's attack on my question.
I didn't attack you. I addressed the question you posed. I didn't refer
to you as reprehensible, rude, ignorant, snyde, lazy, or as you so
eloquently posted offlist to me, a "retard". Don't read anything into a
message that is simply addressing an issue you brought up.
I simply called him on it.
Not quite. If you wanted to "call me on it", you'd simply have flamed me
offlist - instead, you did that (to which I didn't reply), and flamed
onlist as well. You wanted to "piss in the cereal" as you put it and flame
away on the list, which makes you no better than the person who answers
questions too directly and without enough flourish and
bend-over-backwards-to-re-read-the-manualism. It makes you equally as rude
as you imply I am, except there's _nothing_ to be gained from a flame -
certainly nothing of technical merit.
We're here on this list for techical reasons of course, so perhaps the mud
sling could be left at home.
[snip]
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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