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Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 15:08:09 -0500
From: "William A. Gatliff" <bgat AT saturn DOT billgatliff DOT com>
To: Robert Collins <robert DOT collins AT itdomain DOT com DOT au>
Cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com, gdb AT sources DOT redhat DOT com
Subject: Re: [1.3.3] breaks serial i/o?
Message-ID: <20011020150809.A3610@saturn.billgatliff.com>
Reply-To: bgat AT billgatliff DOT com
References: <20011018161003 DOT A3059 AT saturn DOT billgatliff DOT com> <20011018222406 DOT C11830 AT redhat DOT com> <20011019085618 DOT A5013 AT saturn DOT billgatliff DOT com> <20011019114712 DOT A23101 AT visi DOT com> <028e01c1594f$47cf7030$0200a8c0 AT lifelesswks>
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In-Reply-To: <028e01c1594f$47cf7030$0200a8c0@lifelesswks>; from robert.collins@itdomain.com.au on Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 08:09:17PM +1000

Robert:


> Somebody who thinks problems are fixed without details wrote:

Look, I really appreciate everyone's opinion on this whole thing.  But
like schoolyard children crowding around a scuffle, now that you're
all here the show is over.  Move along, nothing more to see.  It's a
dead parrot, Jim.  I've got his tricorder, Christoper took his wallet.

Christopher and I have already made nice, both in public *and*
private.  And we all get along just fine, now, thanks.  In fact, we're
both working closely to see what we can learn about this damned
repeatable problem on my setup.


> You might like to read Eric S Raymonds essay on getting help from
> open source groups.

Perhaps, but you may also like to hear why I posted the messaage I
did.  Grant was right--- I was fully aware of what I was writing.  It
wasn't a perfect posting, but if I had to do it all over again I
probably wouldn't change much.

I've been working with GNU stuff for ten years now, and I've learned
the hard way many times that I'm almost *never* the first person to
spot a bug, especially something that seems so obvious as what I'm
grappling with right now.  I'm getting more sophisticated in my use
and adaptation of GNU stuff, though, so I'm seeing new stuff
occasionally, but it's still the exception rather than the rule.

So I provided an open-ended question, in hopes that someone else had
already traveled the road I'm headed down, and already knows something
useful that I can build upon.  Failing that, I am more than happy to
roll up my sleeves and dig in, in hopes that (a) I'll find the
solution, and (b), I'll save someone else the trouble later on.  My
sleeves are rolled up as we speak, in fact.

Before I posted, I searched the mailing list archives and didn't find
anything at all, even by a broadly relevant term like "serial".  This
means two things: everybody knows it's broken so they've stopped
talking about it (which would be news to me), and/or it's a new
problem (which would be news to the Cygwin team *and* me).

So I posted a delibrately open-ended question, along the lines of, "Is
anyone else having problems with serial i/o and just not mentioning
it?  Is it known to be broken, or am I seeing something new here?"  At
the time, I didn't want or need any more detail than that.  The
response I got was just Christopher having a bad day, and my followup
was my having a bad day (which wasn't Christopher's fault btw).

In the meantime, I did get lots of help from people who apparently
caught on to the motivation of my posting.  Some said "here's a link
to 1.3.2, try that,", others said "serialio has been unstable under
Cygwin for some time," and still others said "I'm doing it, it seems
to work fine."  THIS WAS ALL THE DETAIL I WAS AFTER AT THE TIME.

Now that I know which fork in the road to take (yup, it's apparently
broken and nobody knows much about the problem), I can get to work
figuring out what to do about it.  That's exactly what I'm doing, and
Grant can verify that I'm fully capable of providing any level of
detail on this that you guys want to see.

But in the meantime, I also have to do damage control on the article
I'm working on.  I didn't need a detailed response to know what kind
of band-aid to apply to the manuscript, so I didn't spend much time
gathering details before writing the post.  I should have made that
clearer, but I didn't and some of you apparently have some problems
with that.

> That's like saying "I have a problem with pthreads on linux kernel
> foo, help." and expecting a useful reply. Ha!

Your example is a substantially different question, at least if that's
the only detail the poster provides.  Re-read my original posting, and
I think you'll see what I mean.

I don't know what Eric Raymond's essay says (can't find a URL,
actually), but keep in mind that the definition of "useful reply"
varies widely.  Read between the lines of any posting, try to match
the poster's intent in your response, and educate them on what they
need to do next in order to fully engage your services.


Now, let's move on now, ok?



b.g.
-- 
Bill Gatliff
bgat AT billgatliff DOT com

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