Re: Compiling from scratch.

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

First, thanks for sending in the patch ... on visual inspection it 
looks fine to me,
please keep it up and don't get discouraged.

On Saturday, October 25, 2003, at 07:49 PM, Ian Jones wrote:

> On 2003-10-25 13:36:27 +0000 Martin Brecher 
> <martin@mb-itconsulting.com> wrote:
>
> > Pascal J.Bourguignon wrote:
> > |
> > | The fact is that ffcall 1.8d IS installed:
> > |
> > I just updated from CVS and now base's configure won't find my ffcall,
> > as well, nor ffi.
>
> I don't know what to say other than I'm very unhappy about this, I 
> sent a fix yesterday that only changed base configure so that it would 
> try to use ffi if the default ffcall could not be found, which means 
> that my patch as it was never made it into CVS but someones own 
> implementation of what they thought was a fix and again without 
> testing it even compiled / worked.

I find that a somewhat harsh/unwarrented assumption.  Just because it 
didn't work for some people, doesn't mean that it was untested ... just 
incompletely tested.  The impression  given by the phrase 'without 
testing it even compiled/worked' is that you thing the person didn't 
even bother, when in all likelihood they tested it one way, but didn't 
think to test another way.  I *think* from my memory of looking at the 
code, the faulty change would have appeared to work properly if tested 
on a system without ffcall but with ffi ... and since it was meant to 
correct a problem on just such systems, my guess is that it was tested 
there.
Certainly, not testing *well enough* is a problem, but we should not 
assume that we are looking at a situation of complete carelessness just 
because something gets missed.

> This only one or two days after all the expressed frustration on this 
> list, some of it about the quality of what people are producing or 
> commiting to CVS.
>
> I really understand the frustration that Chris Vetter feels at this 
> moment in time. I'm not much of a developer but I am a perl programmer 
> / web developer by trade and I'd like to think that I'm capable of 
> making minor alterations to a shell script without making a total mess 
> of it. As with Chris, I find myself in a positon where I think, well, 
> why should I bother if people aren't going to use what I spend my time 
> doing to try and help? Should I contribute anything else or just go 
> back to complaining?

Please contribute ... most complaints come from people who don't 
contribute or contribute very little ... and that doesn't help at all!
The reason your stuff didn't get used was because someone got there 
first with what was thought to be a fix ... so your fix never got 
looked at,  This sort of timing thing is not an issue if people 
actually use the bug tracking system on savannah.  For small issues 
mentioned on mailing lists, it is better if people send an immediate 
email to say they will deal with the problem ... but people (and I 
include myself) hardly ever remember/think to do that.

> > - - Martin
>
> Sorry to add more fuel to the fire but I am very very dissapointed.

Don't get discouraged .