Christopher Faylor wrote:
Well, you *could* expect a fix if you provided enough details.
Understood. The question is, can there still be value in reporting that a program crashes, even with minimal but potentially still useful information? I'm just asking and am genuinely interested in hearing the developers' preferences. My choice in this case ("threadlist_ix -1") was either to do nothing (for reasons not directly relevant to this discussion) or to post the information I had (the fact that it crashes and the associated error message). If this kind of less-than-ideal problem report is considered to be always useless, which would come as a surprise to me because as a developer I've seen many cases where a report like this is all that was needed to highlight the problem, then I won't post anything to this list in the future unless I have the resources to produce a complete, easily reproducible bug report.
It is pretty frustrating to see content-free bug reports like "there was also some difference in newline handling"
Please don't take this out of context again, I already explained that this was an illustration of how breaking backward compatibility is inconvenient for users. I don't disagree in principle with decisions of this kind (treating newlines one way or another, accepting DOS paths or not), I only disagreed with the contention that *changing* such behaviour has no significant consequences ("no inconvenience"). I saw references related to newline treatment in the changelog and proceeded to apply fixes to my third-party makefiles (not written by me) without even thinking of mentioning this on the list, but it definitely was inconvenient, and when somebody claimed otherwise I felt I had to respond as I did.
or "My big/complicated makefile SEGVs". Whether you intended these as bug reports or not, they are still reports of problems and no package maintainer wants to see reported problems sent to thousand of people whether they were just intended to blow off steam or not.
As I explained at the top, this wasn't a matter of blowing off steam. It was a question of posting information which I had and considered potentially useful versus posting nothing and leaving you under the false impression that everything works. Given what has transpired, I guess I should have done the latter, or included a long disclaimer explaining why I posted it.
Thanks, Joachim -- work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (http://www.netacquire.com) private: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (http://www.kraut.ca) -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
