Re: Unsubscribing in order to killfile one individual. Was: Re: WARNING! New Perl/Perl-base upgrade removes 141 Sid/Unstable packages
On Monday 10 October 2016 09:07:14 Joe wrote:
> 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.
I accepted that analogy too easily. In this case, the wheel isn't squeaking.
He dislikes the colour and design of the wheel.
Lisi
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