Re: Frequently Asked Questions

[Joachim Dengg <jcd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ferreteers!

I guess Jonathan's announcement finally forced me to "go public" with 
this, especially since he was kind enough to include a link to my
"Ferret Infrequently Asked Questions" Page to complement the FAQ.

So, let me add a few comments:

- Thanks a lot to everyone in Seattle for considering my web-page worth 
  mentioning! - I did notice you guys having a look at it every now and 
  again, but I figured that you'd only use it as an example of mistakes 
  to avoid. ;) (And, from my first brief look at the FAQ-page, I'd say 
  you did avoid several of my mistakes! Nice work!)

- Originally, the Ferret "IFAQ" was set up as an exercise in 
  html-authoring, and as a loose collection of all the mails we keep 
  getting in the user group. Rather than cataloging them in some 
  unix-directory and using "grep" and "more" to find help on topics that 
  I dimly remembered having read about somewhere, sometime, I thought it 
  might be more convenient to click my way through an html-structure.

- Consequently, I took a lot of liberties with the original messages, 
  editing them here or there, merging some, throwing out unnecessary 
  information, etc. If you don't recognize the mail you wrote originally, 
  please don't get upset about it. - Do let me know, however, if I should 
  have introduced errors or things you never intended to say.

- Along the same line: there's no guarantee that the information in the 
  IFAQ is correct everywhere, at any time, for any version of Ferret! If 
  you find things that are clearly wrong, please report them back to me.

- If you have questions on the tips and tricks in the IFAQ, don't 
  ask me, ask the authors! In most cases, I did not yet try the solutions 
  they propose because the problem did not yet come up in my own 
  applications of Ferret.

- At the moment, the IFAQ does not yet contain any information on Ferret 
  versions. Some of the information there may already be outdated, or may 
  not even be true for the new Ferret version. Eventually, I'll introduce 
  some kind of flag to indicate stuff that only holds for older versions.

- Finally: the IFAQ is never, ever up to date! It's only every few weeks 
  that I find the time to throw the mails that accumulated in the 
  meantime into html. At the moment, for example, I have a backlag of 
  almost 2 months. So, please be patient if your brand-new information 
  does not make it to the IFAQ immediately!

Thanks to Jonathan, however, I suppose I'll have a busy weekend coming 
up, where I'll try to catch up and coordinate the "Infrequently 
Asked Questions" with those that by now have become "Frequently Asked".

That's it, Happy Ferreting,
Joachim


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 Joachim Dengg

 AOS Program                        Tel.: (609) 258 1311     
 Princeton University               Fax:  (609) 258 2850
 Sayre Hall                         e-mail: jcd@splash.princeton.edu
 P.O. Box CN710
 Princeton  NJ 08544-0710 
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