Re: No comments (responding to questions on the list)
On Sat, 07 Jan 2006 11:13:30 -0500
kamaraju kusumanchi <raju.mailinglists@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
Let's assume someone writes a perfect application. It is completely bug-free. It's fast, feature-full, lightweight, the dream of every programmer. The programmer posts it somewhere on the web, but never has the time to explain what it does, how it works, etc, so nobody will ever user his application. What's the point in writing such an application? One must find a good balance between the two. IMHO Debian including the whole community is doing a pretty good job, but we have to keep it up. Otherwise, users who might choose Debian will end in using a different distro or even worse, go back to 'doze'. In the long term this is not a good tendency. Our beloved Debian might suffer severe losses from this, not talking about our ideals of FLOSS and so on...
Having a bug-free distro is vital, but supporting the users is almost as important. What's the point of fixing bugs if there's no-one to benefit from it? Ok, it's a bit melodramatic, but you get my point.
Regards
Andrei
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