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Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:53:19 -0700
From: Joachim Achtzehnter <joachima AT netacquire DOT com>
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Subject: Re: Why are Windows paths broken in make 3.81?
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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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