[conspire] I get mail

[Rick Moen]

Every once in a while, I send a polite explanation back to these people, 
mostly to find out if they'll bother to at least write back and say "Oh,
sorry about that.  Thank you."  They never do.  Not word one out of
this one.

It must be nice to be so unbelievably important, that the universe
basically exists to serve you and you have no obligation to say "Oops,
sorry, and thanks for pointing me in the right direction" when you screw
up.


----- Forwarded message from Linda Armelle Nzumotcha Tchoumkam <armelle.nzumotcha at polymtl.ca> -----

Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:50:14 -0500
From: Linda Armelle Nzumotcha Tchoumkam <armelle.nzumotcha at polymtl.ca>
To: respond-auto at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Questions

Good morning Mr Rick Moen,

I am a new user of Cygwin.
I must use it t run a C program (it is an application).
I install the Cygwin using the instructions in the site. But i don't know why
the C program doesn't run.

Can you help me?

Thanks you.


Linda Nzumotcha

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:25:08 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Linda Armelle Nzumotcha Tchoumkam <armelle.nzumotcha at polymtl.ca>
Subject: Re: Questions

Quoting Linda Armelle Nzumotcha Tchoumkam (armelle.nzumotcha at polymtl.ca):

> Good morning Mr Rick Moen,
>
> I am a new user of Cygwin.
> I must use it t run a C program (it is an application).
> I install the Cygwin using the instructions in the site. But i don't know why
> the C program doesn't run.

Hi, Linda.

You've written to me under the impression that I'm a help resource for
Cygwin.  This is, however, not so.  I can explain what happened:

You were on this page:  http://cygwin.com/problems.html

Second paragraph is:

   Before you start asking questions please take a moment to read and
   understand some very good general advice on how to ask smart questions.
   [link]  Once you've followed that link and read the advice, please
   demonstrate that you've actually gained some smartness by not sending
   your Cygwin question to the authors at the link. That would be a
   really stupid thing to do.

(The Cygwin developers wrote that paragraph, not me, so please don't
blame me for its blunt language.)

The "link" is to a Web essay, one that is _not_ on Cygwin's site and has
nothing specifically to do with Cygwin, that I co-wrote with my friend
Eric Raymond.  The essay is a generic attempt to help teach users how
to more fruitfully get help from technical projects -- such as Cygwin,
but we didn't write that essay specifically for Cygwin or any other
particular software.

Eric and I not only are not Cygwin help resources but also don't even
run Microsoft Windows.


If you go back to http://cygwin.com/problems.html, I expect the Cygwin
user community can help you out.  Good luck!


----- End forwarded message -----