Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:59:51 -0400, Jerry wrote:
> I have seen a few users here claim if they receive a transmission and
> it is not in the format that they approve of, they will delete it. Now,
> allow me to say this as nicely as I possible can. If some entity wants
> to send an electronic document formated with a 200 character line
> length, R2L with the characters inverted, that is their right. If the
> intended recipient chooses to discard that communication, that is their
> right.

Mechanism: "You want something - you do something."

If people seek help from this list and present questions like
this:

	I tried to execute http://bob.example.com/script.sh
	and got the error http://bob.example.com/error.txt,
	what should I do?

I bet a majority of mailing list participants would not try
to visit the external sources in the first place, but instead
rightfully expect the code in question and the error message
to be part of the question. (Of course, this is oversimplified,
but I'm sure it's easy to get the idea.)

Instead, if the question was this:

	$ cat script.sh
	#!/bin/sh
	echo "My name is $USER and I'm using $TERM."
	exit 0

	$ ll script.sh
	-rw-r--r--  1 bob  staff  62 2020-06-16 18:32:14 script.sh

	$ ./script.sh
	./script.sh: Permission denied.

Immediately replies would be arriving stating the problem and
offering a solution.

On the other hand - "tool analogy" -, providing external
resources for 200 lines of log messages is surely better than
posting them to the list. Part of Etiquette is what what I
would consider "craft your message carefully and intendedly",
in this example, to only quote directly relevant or exemple
lines from a lengthly log file instead of the whole file.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...