The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

> The correct response to "how do I do ..." is NOT "why do you want to do that?". It is "You can do that this way, but you may want to think about this" or to simply ignore the question.

Actually, "How do I do X" isn't always a useful question. This is called the XY Problem [1] and comes up very frequently in Q&A style support forums [2], to the point where it's a Q&A antipattern [3]. This is why you hear:

> "why do you want to do that?"

It's not because

> The first response is in effect saying "I am better than you and I know more than you so just shut up and do what I tell you".

...that's your projection. It's really about "X doesn't have a direct analogue, and frankly it doesn't make sense in the way you phrased the question. Maybe you want feature Y, but it has somewhat different semantics. I need to know more what you're *really* trying to do, in a broad sense (because it turns out you need Z instead)."

If you intend to ask questions, you must be prepared to answer questions asked of you. Questioning your use-case is not a personal challenge!

[1] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem
[2] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the...
[3] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal