Robert Ritchy writes:
> Listen - as yet another newbie - don't screw things up for me. This list
> has been EXTREMELY helpful to me and my work. The promptness and quality of
> reponse from this list is unmatched. These "gurus" have taken a lot time to
> give us a quality product and support for FREE!!!!! They are certainly not
> asking too much when they expect us to read the README.linux file. If you
> want more support then pay for it - although I don't see how you could get
> more support about java-linux than we are fortunate enough to get here.
>
> Steve, please don't let this get you too pissed off. It's taken all of my
> energy NOT to fill this reply with harsh (and four letter) words.
>
> I'm in great debt to all of you contributing to this port. Thank you for
> all your efforts!
>
Thank you Robert for your kind words. I think this process has had a positive
effect; namely that it's not currently the case that the JRE or the RT packages
contain README.linux. For someone who is developing on Linux, they'd download
the JDK, with README.linux, and they'd be set. But for someone who is just
deploying on the bare runtime system, they don't have an FM to R. That's
easily fixed.
Nevertheless, I think it's important to realize, that I did not say "this guy
is dumb", or anything like that. I said it *is* documented, and that this
person didn't appear to have taken the time to search the documentation that
was supplied with the JDK, so unless he downloaded the JRE only, he had a very
limited search space that he should have exhausted.
It is, IMHO, *especially* important to help newbies develop good habits early,
such as trying the documentation FIRST before taking the time from the rest of
the mailing list. Too often it's easy just to say "I'm too busy" or "my time
is more important than everyone elses". So that's part of why I responded the
way I did. That hurts the signal to noise ratio of any mailing list, and moves
it more towards the AOL end of the spectrum, which I think is where we don't
want to go.
Steve
