Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/06/20/10:28:32
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
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