Re: Unsubscribing in order to killfile one individual. Was: Re: WARNING! New Perl/Perl-base upgrade removes 141 Sid/Unstable packages
On Sun, 9 Oct 2016 21:11:07 -0400 (EDT)
Bob Bernstein <poobah@ruptured-duck.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Oct 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote:
>
> > Why not just killfile me and go on reading everyone else?
>
> Umm...cuz he doesn't know how to do that? Perhaps?
>
> One thing's fer sure, he's giving the time-honored tradition of
> killfiles a bad name!
>
He's right though, isn't he? The wheel which squeaks, gets the oil.
Without complaints, things improve slowly, if at all.
A formal complaint about a piece of software is the bug report, but
much of the time, things go wrong and there is insufficient data or
reproducibility to waste developers' time with an incomplete report.
Just about the only thing to do then is to moan about it publicly.
If it's finger trouble, you find that out very quickly. If nobody
replies, you have something peculiar to your own system, or at least,
not widespread. Live with it. If there's a chorus of 'yes, I've got
that too, but I didn't like to moan', then enough collective data may
surface to make a bug report practical, or at least to come to the
notice of one of the developers, who may be able to shed further light.
The alternatives of putting up with a problem in silence, or going
[back] to Windows, are not optimal.
As for fixing the problem yourself, you are either:
a) a systems programmer, but you probably knew that already, or
b) a user, who could learn enough to contribute usefully in a year or
two, if you didn't have a living to earn.
Fixing a bug so it doesn't happen again, and fixing a bug in a way that
doesn't break *anything* else, are two very different things. I have
enough trouble going back to my own (non-system) programming of a year
or more ago, and finding out how it works well enough to change
something without breaking it. It doesn't matter how many comments I
left, I have to get back into the same mindset as when I wrote it,
and I haven't worked out how to achieve that with comments. Details are
easy to see, it's the overall architecture that needs to be understood
fully.
--
Joe
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