Put down the chocolate-covered banana and step away from the European currency systems.

“ Some questions are logically nonsensical because the querent thinks they know more than they do. A lot of these have the form ‘How do I use X to accomplish Y?’ There's nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes X is a chocolate-covered banana and Y is the integration of European currency systems. ”

— Mark-Jason Dominus

“The general case is:

  1. Someone wants to accomplish task Y.
  2. They determine that a way to accomplish Y is to use facility X.
  3. There is a sub-task of Y, say Z, for which X is ill-suited.
  4. They come into the group and ask ‘how can I use X to accomplish Z?’

This is a problem for people here trying to answer the real question, which is:

How can I accomplish Y?

But nobody can answer this question because the querent never mentioned Y at all, and so nobody knows that the real goal is to accomplish Y.”

— Mark-Jason Dominus.

You've come here because you have asked a question about how to achieve something using a tool that makes no sense, or about how to use a tool in a way that blatantly does not fit its paradigm.

This is the Frequently Given Answer to such questions.

(You can find different approaches to this answer written by Eric S. Raymond, by Charles Cazabon, by Raymond Chen, and by Raymond Chen a second time.)

Put down the chocolate-covered banana and step away from the European currency systems.

What you are asking for makes no sense.

All that you are going to receive by way of responses are bodges that attempt to do the nonsensical task that you have set, from people who are either making wild guesses as to what you are actually trying to achieve, or who don't understand enough about the tool that you have chosen to know that what you are asking makes no sense. In both cases, that isn't going to help you.

State the actual thing that you are trying to achieve. State what your actual problem is. Stop focussing on the minutiae of a particular solution. Stop forcing people to guess what it is that you are actually trying to do.

Forcing people to guess is wasting your time. More importantly, it is wasting their time. Many people will choose not to waste their time on you.

Conversely, when you state your actual goal, people can often quite quickly help you to achieve it. But they are not clairvoyant, and cannot help you to achieve your goal if you never state what your goal is.

© Copyright 2007 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard. "Moral" rights asserted.
Permission is hereby granted to copy and to distribute this web page in its original, unmodified form as long as its last modification datestamp is preserved.