On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 07:33:36AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> How should I [who has *ability* to hyperfocus mitigated by distractibility
> {cf ADHD}] ask questions in this particular forum?As a long time lurker, occasional poster: You can't. One large part of asking questions on practical problems is getting to know the right terminology, understanding the problem space, where in a large system a problem is located, and basically learning to describe the problem. There is no shortcut to this. There are some things that are more or less always helpful: Include full error messages verbatim, show log excerpts, describe your used hard- and software (Debian release, packages involved, hardware architecture). > In my read with PDF related questions, my responses were essentially "Why > are you trying to do?" rather than an answer to to a narrowly focused > question. This happens very often, and often for a good reason. Many questions asked in forums like this here are X-Y problems, with people trying to solve unneeded subproblems instead of their actual problems. There might be some cases where "exotic wish to do x" is not some workaround for something easier, and if this is the case, you basically still have to live with people asking about it. But my main point: Asking questions is an interactive, iterative process. For any realistically complex problem, there will be no simple answer on the first try, in most cases. Even describing the problem correctly will take a few tries. /ralph
