Re: Endianess

[Craig Burley <burley at gnu dot org>]

>Yes, I wish I could keep this issues out of our mailing lists -  
>unfortunately, I don't know of a 100 % sure method.

I for one could have done better by avoiding sending my message
explaining some of the issues, and will try to do so in the future.

It is *real* tempting, as Toon points out, to offer such explanations
on the spot to someone who is likely to be near the "end of their rope"
and possibly having trouble with English, which is a "polite" way of
saying I probably would have ignored the email had it been from a
foobar.com address rather than a .cn one.

And, when replying, it's real tempting to cc the list to help others
avoid typing in the same stuff (which due to list delays doesn't
work), though what can happen is we get a USENET-like mini-thread
(off-topic) going instead.

Perhaps we can add items like this to the FAQ purely as pointers to other
FAQs and net-resources (via URLs and such), e.g.:

  Question 4993: I'm having trouble reading data files written on
    a different machine.
  Answer 4993: See <ftp:...>, <http:...>, ....

  Question 4994: I get SPAM via the egcs mailing list(s), what should
    I do about it?
  Answer 4994: Nothing; see <http:...>.

(Or even "See egcs-5", and have egcs-5 be an id in the FAQ defined
as pointers to URLs, to reduce the size and maintenance costs.)

Then we could individually respond to such email, if we felt we
really had to, with "See 4993 in the egcs FAQ", and we'd feel much
more free to not cc the list (since doing so wouldn't save anyone
any real time).

Two things: we'd have to not renumber question/answer IDs (since
some would tend to memorize them ;-), and people like me would have
to be better about actually looking the question up in the FAQ
first before just assuming it isn't in there and typing in a verbose
response.  (Sigh.)

        tq vm, (burley)