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Re: No comments (responding to questions on the list)



Ken Heard wrote:

Rafi Gabzu wrote:

Hi ,
In the last two weeks I stopped receiving answers to the questions I
post in this mailing list , till now it was very help full.
What happened ? something that I did ...?
Thanks,
Rafi

    I did my own survey of posts to this list and discovered that fully
half of them are never answered.  Andrew Cater suggested two
possibilities as to why:

a.) Everyone thought everyone else was going to answer
b.) No one had the appropriate answer.


If someone is not getting an answer to their question it is most probably a good idea to learn how to ask smart questions. The following links might help.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/du-guidelines.html

Most probably the reasons are not having a good informative subject line, not doing a google search, not searching the archives, not providing enough information to reproduce the problem etc., I highly doubt that the point b ("no one had the appropriate answer") occurs on d-u. It is a tremendous knowledge base....


As for answering questions, the Debian organization should ensure that
*EVERY* question be answered within a reasonable period of time.  The
questions which are answered are mostly answered by somebody on the list
within 48 hours.  Somebody should be designated to see that questions
not answered, say within 72 or 96 hours, will be.  This person should
either answer each question himself or -- more useful -- assign
questions for answer to those people in the organization most suitable
for each question.

Time commitment for support? Well, that might happen if someone is willing to pay. But is a highly optimistic thing to expect from a bunch of volunteers :-) Heck there is no such time commitment for RC bugs ( http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ ) , leave alone for the support of general "help" questions.

raju

--
Kamaraju S Kusumanchi
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/
http://malayamaarutham.blogspot.com/



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