On Sun, 9 Oct 2016 21:11:07 -0400 (EDT) Bob Bernstein <poo...@ruptured-duck.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Oct 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote: > > > Why not just killfile me and go on reading everyone else? > > Umm...cuz he doesn't know how to do that? Perhaps? > > One thing's fer sure, he's giving the time-honored tradition of > killfiles a bad name! > He's right though, isn't he? The wheel which squeaks, gets the oil. Without complaints, things improve slowly, if at all. A formal complaint about a piece of software is the bug report, but much of the time, things go wrong and there is insufficient data or reproducibility to waste developers' time with an incomplete report. Just about the only thing to do then is to moan about it publicly. If it's finger trouble, you find that out very quickly. If nobody replies, you have something peculiar to your own system, or at least, not widespread. Live with it. If there's a chorus of 'yes, I've got that too, but I didn't like to moan', then enough collective data may surface to make a bug report practical, or at least to come to the notice of one of the developers, who may be able to shed further light. The alternatives of putting up with a problem in silence, or going [back] to Windows, are not optimal. As for fixing the problem yourself, you are either: a) a systems programmer, but you probably knew that already, or b) a user, who could learn enough to contribute usefully in a year or two, if you didn't have a living to earn. Fixing a bug so it doesn't happen again, and fixing a bug in a way that doesn't break *anything* else, are two very different things. I have enough trouble going back to my own (non-system) programming of a year or more ago, and finding out how it works well enough to change something without breaking it. It doesn't matter how many comments I left, I have to get back into the same mindset as when I wrote it, and I haven't worked out how to achieve that with comments. Details are easy to see, it's the overall architecture that needs to be understood fully. -- Joe
