Moving cygwin discussions to Usenet? (e.g., alt.os.cygwin)

Eduardo Chappa chappa@math.washington.edu
Mon Sep 30 16:28:00 GMT 2002


*** Jeremy Hetzler (jeremyhetzler@earthlink.net) wrote today:

:) A group that does all the work to answer anyone's question, no matter
:) how obvious the answer or easy to find it is elsewhere, no matter that
:) it is the hundredth time it has been asked that week? Yes, that sounds
:) like a wonderful thing...for the people who are asking the questions.
:) But who's going to do all that work? Where you are going to find these
:) angels who want to spend their free time explaining "What's bash" over
:) and over and over to people who are too lazy to even try Google?

Dear Jeremy,

  I agree in some of the stuff you say. Answering the same question over
and over is tiresome. Right.

  However, you are making the assumption that the only type of questions
that people can ask in such a list is a basic question asked millions of
times before. I will have to disagree with you, there's no proof of that,
just an assumption from your part.

  Let me tell you how I see this. When I've supported Pine, I haven't
looked at the content of the question as much as I've looked at the value
of the answer. Just to give you an example, someone once asked me if Pine
supported justification of several levels of quotes. The answer at the
time was "no". If that person had not asked that question, I would have
never written a patch for Pine that implements such a feature. Same thing
about fancy thread interface in Pine4.44. If you believe that everything
is about the question, I believe that you are missing a lot. It's never
been about the question, but the answer, no matter how many times the
question has been asked before.

-- 
Eduardo
http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/

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