Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:21:44 -0400
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Latest Cygwin Release 5 month old...  (gold star alert)
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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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