From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,978f50245fc02645 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Root of a GNAT problem (was: Gnat v3.05 bug or compilation problem Date: 1996/12/13 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 204501066 references: <58h301$gad@alfali.enst-bretagne.fr> <58h6n2$2hbi@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> <32AD9D35.4D1@lmtas.lmco.com> <32AE0EDC.4D4B@bix.com> <32B01F8F.446B@cpmx.saic.com> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: John Cosby said "Not just that - one of our guys was downloading the source for GNAT yesterday because he couldn't find any other way of finding out if a bug was fixed. A link from the ACT page to a list of bug reports, with the version of GNAT that fixes the corresponding bugs, would be nice and save lots of download time." Well that makes no sense at all to me. Either this "guy" was supported or he was not. If he was not supported, then there is insufficient information anyway to determine whether his bug has been fixed. If he was supported, then he received detailed information about his bug when it was fixed, and can in any case ask for an update. Actually we have found that publishing the list of open bugs is often a complete waste of time. Any time people have tried to deduce information from this list as to whether a particular bug is the same as theirs, they have never been able to provide useful additional input. Many of the bugs listed as open their are essentially undigested, and even the brief description can be completely wrong, since it is often based on the origial user report which turns out to be confused. Properly classifying and understanding a bug report is often 90% of th3 work in fixing the bug, or figuring out that there is no bug in the first place (undoubtedly a number of the bugs listed as open are not bugs at all), so detailed analyses simply are not available.