On Monday 10 October 2016 09:07:14 Joe wrote: > 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.
I quite agree with the idea that squeaks are needed. But there is a limit to how OFTEN it is useful to say it in the one thread. Lisi
