On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 03:24:04PM -0700, Brian Dessent wrote: >Linda Walsh wrote: > >> Nobody like to hear "oh, it's fixed in the latest build, but >> not in the released product." > >Whether they like it or not doesn't change the situation at all. The >fact remains that very often reported problems are fixed in snapshots, >so saying "try a snapshot first" is a very effective way to save a lot >of time on the part of both the person with the problem and the people >on the list that take the hours out of their day to try to help. And >isn't that the goal of everyone posting to the list with problems, to >resolve them quickly? This is a single DLL file we're talking about, >not a linux kernel, and it takes seconds to replace and doesn't require >a reboot. > >> If a developer doesn't think it is good enough to release, >> then I'm not sure I want to be testing on my "production" machine. >> Not everyone has a spare test machine. > >That kind of logic is toxic poison to an open source project. How do >you think those releases come to be? If you want stable releases then >you need to regularly test snapshots and give feedback, otherwise the >releases will not be of high quality. This is all a volunteer effort >here, and the developers' only way of assessing whether their fixes are >effective and stable is by hearing from people on the list that try >them. If everyone played the "I'm not going anywhere near something >that doesn't have the mythical release stamp of approval" card then no >forward progress would ever be made, and you'd have a lot of really >buggy releases.
It's been a while since I've given out a gold star but I think Brian's email definitely rates one. Thanks, Brian, for always being the voice of reason. cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
