Missed opportunity to provide a good answer to a less than ideal question?

Question

First off, I'm not trying to start a pity party for myself, nor am I trying to be overly pedantic - please don't write off my comments as such. Also, to those who responded to the question, I'm trying to be constructive, not critical of your responses.

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TLDR:

I tried to ask a good question and be specific about what I wanted to know. Part of asking questions is that you might ask the wrong question, or a bad question. Bad questions can be handled well with a brief explanation, but it's inevitable that people (like myself) will arrive misinformed. If in that situation, questions are met with disdain, SE will not cater to anyone but experts (regardless if they are professionals, and their question relates to their work). If there is community consensus that this is the purpose of SF, then the faq could be find tuned a bit to make this more clear.

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My question what-is-the-canonical-portable-means-of-determining-only-the-ip-of-an-interface from yesterday, on looking up server ip addresses, wasn't well received (fine, everyone is welcome to their opinion). I realize that my question is very similar to how-can-i-display-the-ip-address-of-an-interface, and that I could have phrased my question differently.

My point is that I asked the question because:

• I was unsatisfied with the solutions I had available (which I did reference)
• I believed that it met the criteria in the faq
• It seemed like there should be a 'better way'
• This is a common task (for me at least), and a good answer should be useful to others

As it turns out, there doesn't seem to be a good solution (i.e. "why do i need to sort though all this terminal output just to get an ip?").

The response that I think would have been more constructive would have been to say:

1. There isn't a good way to do what you're asking
2. Reasons: x, y, z

I would have been happy to accept and upvote that answer.

I also disagree with the closed as "Not Constructive", as I don't think my question met the criteria in the close dialog, or from Gorilla vs. Shark (although "Exact Duplicate" is probably called for).

References:

• why-downvote-a-question-or-answer-on-server-fault
• editing-not-so-good-questions
• dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication

Answer 1

Do I think your question should have been downvoted? No.
It is not a bad question, there's nothing inherently wrong with it (even though it's been asked before).

Do I think your question should have been closed (as a dupe)? Yup.
There's no reason you've given why the solution in the other question won't work for you in your current situation.

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Climbing up on my high horse for a moment, an "answer" does not mean yes, it does not mean no, it does not mean "what the person asking the question wants to hear": In the context of these sites it means a response intended to enlighten and point you at possible solutions for what you're trying to do (or reasons why you shouldn't do it, alternatives to consider, etc.).

In this case it seems you wanted to hear either the tool you want exists. It's caled foo., or No such tool exists. Tough luck. - What you got was pointed at a previous question that explains how to do what you want in a relatively cross-platform way, plus people noting that if you want it to be truly cross-platform there would probably be a bit more work involved. That may not have been what you wanted, but in the immortal words of The Rolling Stones "You can't always get what you want, but if you try some times you just might find you get what you need."

Answer 2

You didn't say which other solutions you had considered and why they didn't meet your requirements. Your question is

What I'd like to know is if there is a single command (or one liner) that displays an ip (either v4 or v6)

The answer is No.

This seemed like a particularly unsatisfactory answer to me so I pointed you at an answer that with a little tweaking can be made to work on a variety of Linux/Unix and Unix like operating systems including macosx. I even asked in chat if the one liner would work on *BSD and Voretaq7 kindly provided an answer for that.

You go on to say

I'd consider the best answer to be the one with few caveats, such as portability .i.e. differences in the output of ifconfig, lack of ip on OS X.

This is what lead me to agreeing to vote that your question was not constructive. In good Q&A there is no best. It seemed to me that you wanted us to play code golf with you being the judge.

Answer 3

While the first part of the question seems quite reasonable and I wouldn't have voted to closed. However, you started pissing me off where you tell us what you think is a good answer and what you will upvote. Quite simply, if you were in a position to make that assessment you shouldn't be asking the question. People will give you the answers they feel are most appropriate. Work on the assumption that most people answering know more about the topic than you do, so don't try to dictate their answers for them.

SF is a Q&A site, so the idea is you ask an answerable question, or at least accept when people tell you there is no answer, and others provide answers based on what they know. SF is not one of those sites where you can buy, sell and trade scores.