\_ SMTP quoth Lynn David Newton on 4/11/2002 07:50 as having spake thusly:
\_
\_ 
\_   David> By and large, you get much better response
\_   David> from a user community (mailing list, irc,
\_   David> news) if you come in saying: I've rtfm'd,
\_   David> tried X, Y, and Z, and cut twice and it's
\_   David> still too short!
\_ 
\_ Very true, but sometimes a person is so in the dark he
\_ doesn't even know quite what questions to ask. [...]

Yup, there is that.  I think this is covered fairly well at some point
in the faqs though... I have to admit that I haven't looked at the RH
faqs in quite some time.  :-/

\_ I'd be surprised if it is, and even so, I'm
\_ sure it's probably buried somewhere in a sea of
\_ over-information.

No!  Over information!?!  

:-)

\_ So if people have a legitimate question and are
\_ struggling with a problem that they don't know even
\_ where to look for the answer, the kind thing to do is
\_ to just give them a straight pointer. 

Or there's the school of thought about giving the nearly correct but
flawed advice and getting them to learn.  I keep advocating that had I
time, I'd write a seriers of books on "What not to do--the reasons".
All the academia papers (among others) tell you what *to* do that was
succesful.  They rarely give even a passing mention to the stillborn
ideas, the ideas that looked promising but got eaten by bears, ... the
vast body of anti-knowledge.

\_ I've asked
\_ thousands of questions in my experience, and have found
\_ that a simple sentence pointing me in the right
\_ direction can be worth way more than an 800-page
\_ dissertation on a subject.

Hush, I'm counting lines in your response.  :-P


David