Can I Appeal "Not A Real Question"

Question

I received a "Not A Real Question" closure on my post here:

What Are the Underlying Protocols/Standards a "Windows File Path" as Opposed to a NFS-Like Linux File Path?

I understand why it was closed, and I'm assuming that reason was that it was too broad. On the other hand, I think it is a very important question, as so far noone "out in the world" (i.e. in my circle of tech-people I am real-world aquaintances with) has been able to give me anything resembling an accurate answer. It is also a bit of a paradox - if I knew what question I was asking in this case, I wouldn't have been asking it. I even tried to specify the existence of such a paradox in my question.

This is probably a very poorly worded question, but the taxonomy of this question is what I'm looking for (so unfortunately at this point I can't help it).

I also followed this up with a clarification which I thought was adequate in a follow up comment:

@Iain "What is your question by the way ?" - I understand what you're getting at, but if I understood that I wouldn't be asking the question. Driftpeasant - sort of. In terms of both of your questions, I guess that I would argue that we don't walk around calling the file system representation for Centos "Centos File Paths", or "Ubuntu File Paths" or even "Linux File Paths", but I do hear Windows users refer to the file system representation (with drive letters) as "Windows file paths". So I guess I'm asking "What the heck is a Windows File path".

If you see the latter part of this follow up, there is - by my own admission - a slightly convoluted but significant question (worthy of the minds on StackOverflow). I would also argue that while my articulation on this wasn't terrific, the examples provided should have given an accurate idea of what I was talking about. I also got one really insightful answer out of it, which I marked as the correct answer and added a comment requesting further comment.

As I said, I think I understand why this was closed, but I also feel in this case it is appropriate that I should be able to appeal the closure. Is it possible to do this?

Answer 1

Can I Appeal “Not A Real Question”

Yes, you can, the biggest problem is that the question was closed by 5 "normal" people, rather than by a moderator hammer, which makes appealing a bit more dubious though.

The biggest issue I see is that the question isn't really answerable by systems administrators. To be fair, our job is to maintain and configure these systems, not to understand their innermost workings and know the history behind design decisions (although a lot of people here do know that, and is probably why they earn more money than me).

That said, you've followed the "correct" procedure for appealing a question closure, so we'll wait and see what the rest of the community says.

Answer 2

I think I understand your question, but isn't the answer covered in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)?

If I was to try re-writing your question I might do it something like below. But I would also probably ask it on superuser, not serverfault since it is more of a generic computing question instead of something that specifically applies to professionals system administration.

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I want to know if there is standard terminiology used to describe the paths to resources on various operating systems.

I know there are several standards that cover paths to network resources. For example:

• Uniform Naming Convention
• Uniform resource locator / Uniform resource identifier

What terminal to you use to describe a path on a unix system.

/etc/some-other-dir

And on Windows?

c:\some-dir\some-child-dir

Are there any standards that describe the various paths on operating systems?

Answer 3

I don't think people have actually grasped what I'm asking here

This is true, I read your question several times before making my comment and even now it's still relevant - I don't really understand what you are asking.

As a sysadmin I don't really care about the design decisions made by the developers of a particular file system I just work with them. A path is a path whether it is c:\some-dir\some-child-dir, /some-dir/some-child-dir, \\some-dir\some-child-dir or even $1$DKA100:[000000.some-dir.some-child-dir].