On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 12:27 AM, Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote: > On 2014-07-21, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> You call it a bug because you can't think of any way it could be >> beneficial. That's the wrong way of looking at it. Something isn't a >> bug because you find it annoying; it's a bug because it fails to >> implement the programmer's intentions and/or the docs/specification. > > I was always taught that it's a "bug" is when a program doesn't do > what a reasonable user expects -- that it's got nothing to do with the > programmer's intent.
There are many definitions of the word, and sometimes they disagree. (That's why it's common to have an "issue tracker" rather than a "bug tracker"; often the "is this a bug report or a feature request" question doesn't even matter. In theory, version x.y.? releases should have bug fixes but not feature additions, but sometimes some bug fix might potentially break code, so it's deferred till the next x.? release. Or a feature addition is allowed to be backported, because it's Idle, not the core language.) But even using that definition, I would not say that one single person saying "this can't possibly be useful" is enough to define something as a bug. Take, for instance, the behaviour of Windows's cmd.exe editing keys: enter three commands, then up-arrow three times and hit enter, then press down, enter, down, enter. You'll repeat the three commands. In other interfaces (eg GNU readline), you'd do the same job by pressing up, up, up, enter each time. Personally, I find the cmd.exe behaviour extremely surprising, especially when I've been working with some very similar commands (imagine: ./configure some_bunch_of_args; make; some_command_to_test; rm -rf *; git checkout HEAD - then repeat with a different set of configure arguments), and I end up "stuck half way up command history", wondering why I'm not seeing what I wanted. Can be extremely awkward. But even so, I don't call this a bug. It's entirely possible that it is one - some internal state that isn't being reset correctly - as I don't have docs or the programmer's intention to compare against. However, I can't honestly call it a bug based on just my own use-cases. I personally find it useless and unhelpful, but that doesn't make it a bug any more than a colourblind person would find a colour-based UI phenomenon a bug. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
