Re: .exe.stackdump and core dump files questions

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2006 at 05:53:28PM -0000, Dave Korn wrote:
>On 24 November 2006 13:25, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>[thread properly TITTTL'd for reasons of bock-bock-bock-baaaagaaaaaawk!]
>
>>> Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 22:43:45 +0100
>>> From: Corinna Vinschen
>>> 
>>> On Nov 23 22:07, Angelo Graziosi wrote:
>>>> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>>>> Yes.  It's called "cat".
>>>> 
>>>> Do you think to be fun? or that a sequence of HEX characters are
>>>> human-readable?
>>> 
>>> There's nothing funny here.  The stackdump file is human-readable
>>> and there's no more information.  If you want more information
>>> you need a debugger and executables built with debugging information.
>> 
>> It really is NOT funny: it's perfectly clear what Angelo was asking
>> for, even though English is evidently not his first language.  Instead
>> of helping him, like the other 2 respondents did, Chris decided to
>> mock him in public -- a terribly unfriendly and unprofessional thing
>> to do, which doesn't add any respect to this forum.
>
>  Just because it isn't very funny doesn't mean it was mocking.  Or even that
>it was /meant/ to be mocking, since intent and consequences are not always one
>and the same.
>
>It's facetious to attempt to infer someone's state of mind and
>motivation from a single line of text with only four words in it, many
>would consider that far too small a sample to be statistically valid.
>But, hey, I *am* pretty facetious, so I'm going to try![*]
>
>My *guess* (because 'guess' is all that any of us have been doing so
>far) is that cgf saw the post, saw that it had already been answered
>with all the relevant information, and didn't see why not to post a
>"ha-ha-only-serious" type of quickfire humorous comeback.  Which fell
>flat on its face, but it's a long reach from there to "mocking".

This is fairly close to what happened except for the fact that 1) the
term "human readable" doesn't mean "I don't understand the output"
(otherwise I could claim that Hebrew wasn't human-readable) and 2) I
tend to approach technical support issues with few expectations of the
ability of the person asking the question and often reply exactly to
what the person asked*.  Part of the reason that I do that is to get the
person thinking about expressing themselves more clearly and part is
because, over the years, I've grown to find the "I'm going to ask a
question and I want you to assume a bunch of stuff which may or may not
be true" style of bug report to be exasperating and sometimes I give
in to the urge to reply facetiously.

I can understand why the OP didn't like having his question treated
literally but I think expending a lot of time analyzing the motivations
behind a four word response is ludicrous.

And telling someone that they should be "ashamed" is just adding logs to
the fire.

cgf

*http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html