[haiku-development] Re: Researching before mailing (was: Banning)
- From: Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 16:54:30 +0200
Am 15.05.2010 um 20:53 schrieb Ingo Weinhold:
On 2010-05-15 at 14:03:48 [+0200], Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber@xxxxxx
>
wrote:
Me too, I have been accused of having wasted the OP's time by posting
a question on this mailing list that he felt obliged to answer (after
having unsuccessfully searched the Internet).
[...]
Since you sum it up like that, I guess my point didn't come across
as I
intended. In short it is that I expect from someone who has already
shown
some promising contributions and apparently intends to work on a
rather
challenging task to exhaust his available tools to get information
before
hitting the mailing list.
Large mailing lists simply involve too much overhead, as mails are
forced
upon all subscribers. Unlike IRC, BTW. That's really something
everyone
should have in mind before writing a mail.
You're free to, and I still stand by my point. I am guilty of not
having Google-searched for Mercurial rebasing functionality. But in
this particular advanced-Haiku case the point is that Google just gave
you zero helpful results. (Now in this case hopefully my blog and the
new Guide.) That's because, in order to keep Trac alive, it was
decided to ban bots from dev.haiku-os.org via robots.txt. Nor is
apparently the Swedish OpenGrok-based site included in search engine
results.
You obviously know many things Haiku, and knowing where to search is
certainly among them. If everyone knew that, there would be no place
for "the Googles".
For me it takes hours researching with grep, gEdit and dprintf which
code paths are taken in the kernel and in which order certain init
functions are called. On the other hand I can quickly retrieve info on
tickets in certain areas because I have some handy pre-defined queries
two clicks away and I don't mind taking those few seconds. That's the
essence of a community - everyone has its (small) area to contribute
to. If you think a question is a waste of (your) time, don't answer it
right away, someone else might do that with a smile. A felt 50% of the
messages on mono-list are "How do I install xyz on Ubuntu?", which is
tiring to me, so like most people I will ignore them and they still
get answered. Just like Linux-centric mailing lists get bunches of
maybe-40-patch series with one or two replies (note the lim(OP ratio) -
> 100% ;)), of which one may be "Applied, thanks", which don't touch
your area of expertise or interest. I just live with it.
On the other hand I don't have an IRC client on OpenSolaris (where I
do my ppc development), and my chosen user name was recently rejected
according to Colloquy - no idea why, I'm not too familiar with the
technology. The problem with IRC from my POV is that it doesn't allow
for time-shifted answers on such advanced topics, there's a lot of
jitter (no clear threads and many funny but off-topic comments) and
thus archiving the answers you're interested in is much more
inconvenient than your local email inbox.
Back on the topic of researching, might it be possible to loosen the
robots.txt so that /ticket/* gets indexed and just /browser/* is
blocked and to have a checked out copy of the /haiku/trunk source tree
available for indexing elsewhere?
Andreas
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