Re: Development process in the Ada community

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<3CC10367.4000904@telepath.com>...
> 
>>With me, occasionally someone will just be so lost that it would take 
>>forever to help them out, and I have other commitments (a job, a house 
>>and yard, a wife and 2 kids) that preclude me from spending the time to 
>>give them the help they need. Its always painful when I have to tell 
>>someone I can't help them any further.
>>
> 
> And it is *less* painful not to give them anything in the first
> place???
> Sort of like meeting a beggar on the street and deciding to give
> nothing,
> because otherwise you will feel a moral obligation to provide food,
> clothing,
> and housing :-)


I'm not sure how your analogy relates to what I said at all (perhaps you 
thought I was talking about not helping at all, rather than giving up 
when there's no more I can reasonably do?). However, that is actually a 
fair charactarization of my attitude toward beggars, so perhaps you are 
onto something. :-)


>>by being a bit anal about submitted bug reports being in the proper form 
>>from unsupported users
>>
> 
> That's because we find it is only worth while for us to pay attention
> to well submitted reports. We pay attention to such reports not to help those


Exactly. I wasn't trying to complain about it, so no explanation was 
really nessecary. I was pointing out what I thought was a pretty 
effective policy of yours.

> How odd .. Ted Dennison is indeed one of the people who over the years
> has chafed at not being able to get free support, but I don't feel the
> least bit "ruthless" in not providing Ted any kind of support. We are like any


Hmmm. I really don't remember ever having any big problem with ACT not 
doing free work for me. However, we've both been around here a very long 
time, and my memory's notoriously bad, so I'll grant that I could be 
wrong. If I ever did cop that kind of attitude, I'm sorry. That's a 
really stupid way for me (or anyone else) to behave.

OK...now that I think about it there was that one time I fatally flubbed 
a bug report (in a way that would have required work on ACT's part to 
straighten it out). But that was my own stupid fault. You were 
absolutely right to bounce it.

>For
>example, the GNU project itself frowns on people taking untested
>snapshots
>and making them into widely distributed products. It's just not
>helpful to
...
> "spirit of the GPL" here. The spirit of the GPL is about allowing
> effective
> sharing of software. Sometimes, effective sharing involves NOT
> prematurely
> widely distributing things, and everyone understands this.


I guess you're right there, as far as the current situation goes. It was 
really more of an issue in days gone by, when there was no public 
baseline like typical GNU projects have to go to for interim bug fixes. 
Thus you were effectively asking people not to allow anyone else access 
to baselined bug fixes. Since Gnat is part of the gcc baseline now, we 
don't really have that problem any more.