No Thanks for All the Help

[Joe Kelsey]

On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 15:23, Joe Kelsey wrote:
> Gee, I ask a seemingly simple question about connecting a very simple
> driver to the system and all of ZERO people chime in with help.
> 
> The only thing anyone had to say involved something like "Read and
> update isa_compat.h" and I can take it from there!  However, noone said
> that or anything else for that matter.
> 
> It really upsets me because it seems that absolutely *no* documentation
> exists for how to connect a driver to FreeBSD 4.x.  Documentation exists
> for 3.x and 5.x, but none for 4.x.

Well, I did generate quite a bit of response to this particular
message.  Probably more than 90% of the response involved snide and
sarcastic remarks about how no one should ask questions on the stable
list and ever expect to receive an answer to them.  A very small
percentage of respondents actually offered sympathy and some even
offered good ideas.

I want to thank those few people who actually responded with
non-sarcastic and non-snide information for their help.  I also want to
tell anyone who felt compelled to send me a snide or sarcastic remark
that I have safely placed your response in the appropriate folder.

> This mailing list just seems useless to me.

You know, all anyone ever had to do was to answer my original request
with a simple message saying please ask again on -hackers.  Or simply
point me at the particular file which contains the linkage code for
old-fashioned device drivers.  No one did this until I sent out my
message complaining about how hard I find it to work in the totally
unhelpful environment.  I personally have years of experience working
around many different environments, and the most difficult part always
involves trying to figure out someone else's undocumented code.  I
specifically did not want to go down the whole isa module route as that
adds an incredible amount of seemingly irrelevant cruft to a very simple
device driver.

Anyway, I have nothing else to say on this matter.

/Joe