Subject: Re: Release/Tree closing
From: Dom Lachowicz (dominicl@seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 11 2001 - 14:57:15 CDT
Hi Paul,
> Thanks for setting a clear deadline.[1]
This is part of my "light a fire under someone's ass" mentality that I take
toward certain things. Some people tend to sit back all too quietly until an
insane deadline or some other pressure is put onto them. Then the complaints
come flowing out, and usually they're worthwhile. And that's partially what I
wanted to do here. My intentions of a "release soon" have been known for a while
now, and generally without much reaction. Martin and I have been tossing around
a TODO list online for about 2 weeks now. Unfortunately, it's mainly just been
Martin replying to his own previous emails saying that he or I had fixed some
bug. Maybe I should've been more proactive and taken a different approach here.
I just care about releasing a quality product. But I also don't want to wait
indefinitely to do so either.
The point is that I know what Martin and Hub are doing. I know what their
progress is, their estimated completion dates, etc... I don't know this for a
lot of other people, and this really sucks for platforms which I don't have
access to.
> I'm sure that Dom and Martin have already made this kind of assessment,
> or
> else they wouldn't be calling for a release now, but it behooves the
> rest of
> us to take time, now, to see for ourselves.
On Unix, we're close. It's concievable that everything could be in order in less
than 48 hours here.
> >Win32 guys - two things:
> >1) Does the List dialog work yet?
> >2) Is the Style dialog working?
> >
> >If not, I will #ifdef WIN32 around these things, but in an ideal world,
> I
> >wouldn't have to do that.
>
> Ouch. I hope I won't be the only person looking at the Win32 build
> today,
> because questions like this scare me. Not as much as Mike's post
> earlier
> today, though. :-(
Mike's bug could be Win32 specific or specific to Mike's computer. It isn't
reproducible on Unix. But that's beside the point.
> To be blunt -- it's scary to see us allowing Win32 to fall behind,
> because
> that's where a *ton* of our existing (and potential) users are.
> According
> to our primary source of download counts (SourceForge), we have more
> Win32
> downloads than all other platforms combined!
That's quite true. I hate it that Be has fallen behind, and the only person who
would work on Be (Jamie) has just all-but given up. I dislike that win32 has
also fallen behind. I know everyone has heard the story that this is a volunteer
project and volunteers work on stuff when they can, etc... It's all too true. So
at some point, sacrifices must be made.
Michael Pritchett has said that he would try working on the styles dialog when
he got a chance, but that was about a week ago and I haven't heard anything.
Andrew Dunbar is out of touch for the next few weeks. I have the last of his
work lying around in patch form on my HD waiting for us to branch. Thomas is
working on the QNX dialog and I think that he's close.
So _please_ tell me what your expectations are for these platforms and their
respective outstanding bugs. I can see and close XP and Unix bugs. Win32 bugs
just aren't getting filed any more. Yes, we do have probably more win32 users
than any other. But win32 users are, well, win32 users - an application crashes
and it's "just normal". If things get buggy, they just don't use that program
any more. The thought of filing a bug in a bug database generally never crosses
their minds - it's just not in their nature. Is this a bad thing? Well, from a
user's perspective, no. But from someone who could use the feedback (and without
a "Paul Egli" ;-), this sucks.
Also, the win32 nightlies aren't working any more, so I can't even do a quick
visual inspection to see the state of things. I can only fight what I can see.
> still deciding whether to holler
Consider me hollering for you.
Take care,
Dom
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Jul 11 2001 - 14:57:18 CDT