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


On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 03:28:00PM -0700, Eduardo Chappa wrote:
>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.

Um, yeah.  This is sort of obvious, isn't it?

Cygwin has progressed because of user observations and complaints.  Take
a look at Cygwin circa 1998 and Cygwin circa 2002.

To use one example: mmap.  It has improved steadily over the last year
because Corinna has listened to people saying "why doesn't this work?"
She could have said "Because it isn't implemented, stupid!" or "Because
it is too hard!" but she didn't.  She just implemented new features and
pushed the envelope of what was supported.  The fact that mmap works
on Windows 95 at all, is a minor miracle.

However, this really side steps the issue.  Five hundred "How do I get
to the previous command in bash?" questions are not going to lead to new
insight about cygwin.  That's what we're talking about.  A question like
(to use a recent example) "Why doesn't vim notice when I resize a
console window under cygwin?" will lead to cygwin insights.  I'd rather
see those kind of questions asked in the official forum and point the
bash people to the appropriate documentation.

Basically, I don't see anything that's been discussed which will make
this newsgroup more useful than the mailing list.  We've already shown
that it won't be a very attractive place for experienced people to hang
out because, apparently, observations like "You really should read the
bash info page, specifically the section on the command line" will be
considered overly harsh.  Instead, every answer should be kind and
caring towards the newbie status of the questioners who should never be
treated with anything other than complete patience.  And, every question
should just be answered without any thought to teaching people where to
find things.

Again, I have to wonder who would want to hang out in such a forum.  I
also have to wonder how it would be possible that this one place on the
internet could be carved out differently than every other place I've
seen.


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