Annual Reminder: How To Ask For Help

[Jay Ashworth]

Similarly to the open-source programming community, the filePro list is
a collection of people who need, and who can supply, help to one another 
about the work we do programming applications in the filePro 3.75GL (:-)
programming language.

Since none of us, generally, are paying one another for this help, you might
find it useful to review two of my favorite Internet whitepapers on how to
get help from people whom you aren't paying for the privilege -- a common 
condition with GPLd and FOSS software.  Of course, several of us would be
glad to help you for money, as well, if you'd rather be broke than polite. :-)

The first is from Eric Raymond and Rick Moen:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

It's called "How to ask questions the Smart Way", and it explains, in short,
what we will expect you to have already done before you come a-askin. 
Religious people tend to use the phrase "God helps those who help themselves",
but whether that's your tradition or not, it's safe to bet that if we send
you a log, and a boat, and a helicopter, and you're *still* up on the roof
of your house, we're probably done...

The other is aimed somewhat more at the environment of an end-user complaining
about a bug in a packaged program, which is *usually* but not always not the
case we see on this list -- unless we're talking to Ken... :-) -- but it 
still contains a lot of good attitude adjustment on the topic.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

This one is called "How to report bugs effectively", and it's by Simon 
Tatham whom some of you will recognize -- all right, all right; let's not 
always see the same hands -- as the author of the PuTTY terminal emulator.

Being a pretty high-profile free software guy, Simon, as you might imagine,
gets a lot of bug reports.  And he would prefer ones that look like this:

https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=31900

or even this:

https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43741

rather than

"Hey, your program sucks!"  (If you want lots of additional examples,
go look at the comments on lots of apps in the Android Market, frex.)

===

In short, if you expect us to help you, we expect you to do at least a
*little* of the legwork yourself -- including being able to state the
problem clearly, being able to answer simple questions before going 
off on a tangent, and being nice.

Not all of us are as tolerant of Ken (who, kudos, does a *really* 
remarkable job in the sometimes uncomfortable position of "company rep
on a user-group mailing list")... but lots of us are at least nearly
as smart.

Nuff said?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274