> I've never understood why people feel they must do this. It is my opinion,
> that if someone cannot or will not answer the person's question specifically,
> then they should refrain from responding. RTFM is a completely unhelpful post
> that wastes bandwidth and annoys people.
I agree that the politeness of a response is very important, but I have to say that I'm not
convinced RTFM (or some variation thereof) is not a useful answer if the information being sought
is easily obtained from documentation and the answer points a user to specific docs.
I learned a _lot_ of what I know on irc and, in retrospect at least, I'm glad that most of the
answers I got were 'check this url' or 'man X'. It's sort of like the old 'give a man a fish...'
addage. By being told what documentation to look up, I learned to read documentation (a skill in
itsself) and thus gained so much more knowlege than if I'd just had answers fed to me on demand.
It made me more self-sufficient and thus increased Linux's accesability.
So nowadays when I go asking for help on IRC I phrase my questions as "where can I find the
relevant docs for problem X" unless the problem is especially specific.
When I'm offering help I give real answers, enough to get them going (unless the solution is
_really_ trivial), but add on "for more information, make sure to read X" or "...but before you
start running apache for real, check out the HOWTO at tldp.org" and so forth.
I guess the short version of my point is: While rudeness is never helpful, I think that reading
documentation is a skill that people still need to have developed in order to use Linux
effectively for anything but the most trivial tasks. And, let's face it, many people (myself
included at one point) won't look up even the most readable documentation when they can get
instant gratification, even if the former is more helpful in the long run.
--Brad
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