Re: How to ask a question?
On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 07:33:36AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> How should I [who has *ability* to hyperfocus mitigated by distractibility
> {cf ADHD}] ask questions in this particular forum?
As a long time lurker, occasional poster: You can't.
One large part of asking questions on practical problems is getting to
know the right terminology, understanding the problem space, where in a
large system a problem is located, and basically learning to describe
the problem. There is no shortcut to this.
There are some things that are more or less always helpful: Include full
error messages verbatim, show log excerpts, describe your used hard- and
software (Debian release, packages involved, hardware architecture).
> In my read with PDF related questions, my responses were essentially "Why
> are you trying to do?" rather than an answer to to a narrowly focused
> question.
This happens very often, and often for a good reason. Many questions
asked in forums like this here are X-Y problems, with people trying to solve
unneeded subproblems instead of their actual problems.
There might be some cases where "exotic wish to do x" is not some
workaround for something easier, and if this is the case, you basically
still have to live with people asking about it.
But my main point: Asking questions is an interactive, iterative
process. For any realistically complex problem, there will be no simple
answer on the first try, in most cases. Even describing the problem
correctly will take a few tries.
/ralph
Reply to: