Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/07/24/15:53:29
Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Well, you *could* expect a fix if you provided enough details.
Understood. The question is, can there still be value in reporting that a
program crashes, even with minimal but potentially still useful
information? I'm just asking and am genuinely interested in hearing the
developers' preferences. My choice in this case ("threadlist_ix -1") was
either to do nothing (for reasons not directly relevant to this discussion)
or to post the information I had (the fact that it crashes and the
associated error message). If this kind of less-than-ideal problem report
is considered to be always useless, which would come as a surprise to me
because as a developer I've seen many cases where a report like this is all
that was needed to highlight the problem, then I won't post anything to
this list in the future unless I have the resources to produce a complete,
easily reproducible bug report.
> It is pretty frustrating to see content-free bug reports like "there
> was also some difference in newline handling"
Please don't take this out of context again, I already explained that this
was an illustration of how breaking backward compatibility is inconvenient
for users. I don't disagree in principle with decisions of this kind
(treating newlines one way or another, accepting DOS paths or not), I only
disagreed with the contention that *changing* such behaviour has no
significant consequences ("no inconvenience"). I saw references related to
newline treatment in the changelog and proceeded to apply fixes to my
third-party makefiles (not written by me) without even thinking of
mentioning this on the list, but it definitely was inconvenient, and when
somebody claimed otherwise I felt I had to respond as I did.
> or "My big/complicated
> makefile SEGVs". Whether you intended these as bug reports or not, they
> are still reports of problems and no package maintainer wants to see
> reported problems sent to thousand of people whether they were just
> intended to blow off steam or not.
As I explained at the top, this wasn't a matter of blowing off steam. It
was a question of posting information which I had and considered
potentially useful versus posting nothing and leaving you under the false
impression that everything works. Given what has transpired, I guess I
should have done the latter, or included a long disclaimer explaining why I
posted it.
Thanks,
Joachim
--
work: joachima AT netacquire DOT com (http://www.netacquire.com)
private: joachim AT kraut DOT ca (http://www.kraut.ca)
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