Lots of the developers receive alot of mail. It's not just an erran tuser here or there, sometimes there are hundreds a day. If you take even a minute to answer each mail (forward them to an rtfm or something nicer), you can waste hours per day. Sometimes peope have time to do this, sometimes they don't. If people write to the mailing list, they will get an answer from someone who has time to answer it.
So the question is, how do you drive people to the lists. You could mail them back and say 'ask on the list'. Unfortunately this consumes time for each one you send. There are many many php users, and many of them (as this internals list has demonstrated in the past) dont get the clue when you tell them to direct their questions elsewhere. So the best solution is often just to ignore them. If they really want an answer, they will keep looking until they find the correct resource (a mailing list).
Note that this is the same way commercial software companies work. If I write Joe, the Oracle tech I investigated a bug with earlier, he _will not_ right me back. He has a job, and there is a bug management and support system that will assign me to a resource that they think is optimal. It's not my perogative to choose my support tech. This may seem inhuman, but it's critical to efficient and productive time management.
The bottom line is that everyone working on PHP is a volunteer. You (royal you, not you in particular), do not need to be grateful for volunteers time, but you cant make personal demands on it.
George
On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 10:28 PM, Olivier Hill wrote:
Jani Taskinen wrote:The purpose was to inform the user where he can find help.This is not the problem you should be solving, move along.
I just did what Marcus suggested: inform the user about the new "policies" regarding MySQL/PHP integration. If the user is aware of the problem, he won't ask George why it's not working anymore (with the bundled librairies), fixing the "one-on-one" user/developper questions.
Anyways, I'll just shup up and sit back, reading my email, since I feel I'm disturbing some developpers on this list.. Sorry if I did/ask/wanted to contribute too much.
Oliver
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