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Date:      Tue, 15 Jan 2002 18:59:05 -0600
From:      "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1011574745.7d17f9@mired.org>
To:        "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>
Cc:        <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: USB CF reader (SanDisk) epilog
Message-ID:  <15428.53337.168408.720031@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <00ee01c19e0d$4c518960$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
References:  <15428.34332.870130.2946@guru.mired.org> <00cc01c19e06$8dafddf0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15428.38970.224790.33804@guru.mired.org> <00ee01c19e0d$4c518960$0a00000a@atkielski.com>

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Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> types:
> Mike writes:
> > The source has proven to be adequate documenation
> > for others to solve similar problems.
> 
> Perhaps in a few isolated cases, but in overall practice this is a
> widespread misconception. 

For sufficiently broad definitions of "few" and "isolated" that's
true. There are 10s, if not 100s, of thousands of people with the
necessary skills.

> One reason why technical support groups try to solve problems by
> throwing darts and rolling dice,

True, but in my experience it's not the main one. The main one is that
debugging problems remotely means you've got fragmentary and often
inaccurate information to work with. Even with the vendors complete
documentation and access to the source, you wind up having to guess as
to what really happened, then provide a solution for that guess. If
the guess was wrong, the solution will be as well.

> even though they often have access to source, is that source code
> only tells you what a computer is doing, not why it is doing it.  It
> usually does no good to see in source how error 123 is processed if
> you don't know what error 123 represents.

Ah, I see your problem - you're looking in the wrong place. You don't
care how error 123 is processed, you want to know why it
occurred. That's a different question.

> > ... the output of "usbdevs -v" for the
> > usb device in question.
> The output of the command seems to just print what I put in the usbd.conf
> file, and I don't know why I put what I did in that file, since I just
> copied it from somewhere else (no documentation, as usual).

In that case, provide a copy of usbd.conf instead. Since I never
detach my usb devices, I don't use usbd.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

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