A number of times I have asked a certain kind of ‘attractive nuisance’ question – that is, one in which I anticipate a certain kind of answer would be given that I already know I am going to find insufficient or entirely inadequate. Some examples:
- fsck exit status "System should be rebooted"
- Assigning to a variable in a parent context in Bash
- Network interface of type ‘phonet’ – what is it good for?
A more abstract example would be asking ‘is it possible to do this 100% correctly’, where people itch to come up with hacks, workarounds and half-baked solutions of various degrees of robustness – while the point of the question is obtaining a fully correct and reliable solution.0
I try to be very explicit in the question body about what kinds of answers I am not interested in. And yet, every time I ask such a question, someone gives such an answer anyway, or an outright XY-type, i.e. frame-challenge answer – where in fact the framing of the question is exactly how I want it, and I don’t want it challenged.
Since I have already said in the question body that such an answer would be inaqeduate, when I get one, I downvote it. I believe it’s only appropriate, but it tends not to be received very well – I get insulting comments and downvotes in retaliation.
I realise that a proper answer would be much harder to come up with than an ‘obvious’ inadequate answer. I suspect that often a real answer should be negative: ‘there is no way to do that’ or ‘there is no way to answer that for sure’. Nevertheless, if that is the right answer, this is the one I want posted – I don’t want the Internet polluted with more tumbleweed of what is already well-known (and may even be subtly wrong), and I don’t want to give ‘A for effort’ upvotes.
What is the most appropriate way to act in such a situation?
0 I am also reminded of when Gary Bernhardt asked Twitter whether it’s possible to control the lexical environment in which eval
ed code executes while trying to avoid reflexive ‘don’t use eval
’ replies. Of course, expecting nuance from Twitter of all places is silly, but that’s beside the point.