Re: Bug#3253: Pine base64 bug
On Aug 21, Santiago Vila Doncel wrote
> On 21 Aug 1997, Guy Maor wrote:
> > There is no stigma associated with having bugs filed against your
> > package. Nobody is calling you a bad maintainer because of
> > long-standing bugs.
>
> But *I* would call myself a bad maintainer if I keep this open and let
> others to waste their time with it, when we have so many more bugs to
> fix, against free packages, and much more serious than this one.
while (bug doesn't exist)
{
wait for someone to find "feature";
person opens bug as it doesn't exist;
maintainer closes bug;
}
The person would probably check the documentation first, but for
something like this, why not leave it open. I havn't heard anyone say
that they *prefer* pine to encode it, just that some don't consider it a
bug. The more "bug reports" about it, the more likely the pine developers
might listen. OTOH they may have an attitude problem (I used pine for a
few years and it has several idiosyncrasies that IMHO should have been
fixed ages ago - a little pain then to save alot of pain now).
> > Our goal is to produce the best Unix anywhere, and the bug system is
> > an integral part of that goal.
>
> I though the goal was to produce the best *free* Unix. Remember that pine
> is a non-free package.
Irrelevant. If there was a "feature" like this in a non-free package,
which hard to fix, the same arguments could be used. I use the bug system
to see if a bug is already reported, sometimes it is not a bug but a
"feature" or something I've done wrong. I can't see past bug-reports so I
file a bug report which then gets closed - this wastes my time and that
of the maintainer.
FWIW I disagree with the "only free software" policy. For instance GPL
software isn't really free as you are not allowed to do anything you want
to it. It's a commercial world and some people are prepared/need/don't
mind paying for someones hard work.
Adrian
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