[horde] OT: smart questions (was: Re: Latest CVS breaked the IMP login)

[rogerk at queernet.org]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:
> Please read http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html.

I respect your development efforts, Chuck.  Boy howdy, do I.  But...

Unfortunately, that page is a mixture of good advice and inappropriate elitist 
crap, depending on who the recipient of the advice is.

As for the list of "what do do before you ask" found there --

1.  Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.

2.  Try to find an answer by reading the manual.

3.  Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.

4.  Try to find an answer by searching the Web.

5.  Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.

6.  Try to find an answer by reading the source code.

...for most of us, #2, #3, and ten minutes to an hour's worth of #1 and #4 make 
sense.

Spending hours or days on #1 when others on a list may have seen an issue, 
addressed it for themselves, and moved on without telling anyone is a colossal 
waste of time, as is trying to figure out if there is relevant information in 
250,000 matches to a web search.  Most of us don't have "skilled friends" -- 
that's one of the purposes of participating in a -users type list.  And as for 
#6, if open source software is going to be useful to the masses, the 
whole "intelligence test" thing has got to go.  "The source is the 
documentation" has to be replaced with "it's not checked in till it's tested 
and documented -- man pages (pod, whatever) is part of the code."  If that part 
is done -- and "I don't do documentation" only means "I don't write the pretty, 
task-oriented end-user documentation" -- then #2 can make sense.  Until then, 
it's just Geex4Geex.

(One also has to make allowances for the English skills of someone who 
thinks "breaked" is a word.)
  
As for the "arrogance" point on that page: whether a checkin "breaked" the IMP 
login for everyone, or just for him, it did change something, and the 
observable behavior is that what worked before doesn't work.  If he made no 
changes to the setup other than updating and something stopped working, the 
checkin *did* break IMP login on his system.  That doesn't mean it was bad or 
wrong.