On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 Ben Rubinstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I think the Geometry Manager is a nice idea that needs a lot more work. I
> won't claim to have gotten to the bottom of it, but I spent considerable
> time with it when I started working with Rev, followed by some more time
> eradicating all trace of it, followed by not that much time achieving the
> originally desired effects 'by hand'. If it worked right, it would be great
> - I hope that revisiting it is somewhere on RunRev's to-do list, though not
> perhaps at the top.
>
> (Unless it has already been substantially improved, and I just failed to
> read about that in the release notes? :-)
While we're on the subject, I'd like to put in my 2 cents about why
generating such release notes is a *bad* idea, and why people who are
asking for such things are doing a disservice to the development team
and to themselves and other users of the product.
First of all, we've generated a README file for MetaCard with each new
release going on 10 years now that lists major new features and
incompatibilities introduced. But despite this being a very important
and useful document, we find that few people read it. Increasing its
size by an order of magnitude or more by documenting every tiny little
change or bug fix will make it pretty much useless even to those few
who read the READMEs now.
Secondly, it takes time to generate these things, time that would be
much better spent on development or producing other types of
documentation. For example, would you prefer having a detailed list
of all the bugs reported against the geometry manager along with a
response to each of them, or would you rather just have it work? In
many cases, that's the choice you're forcing. (And as an aside, if
you really *don't* know whether it has already been "substantially
improved" as your comment above indicates, you're obviously not beta
testing, which you should be if you care at all about the quality of
the product).
Finally, and most importantly, anyone who *doesn't* report a bug
because they read about it in a README, or worse, doesn't actually
verify that a bug they have reported is fixed in a new release
regardless of whether it's listed in some README, is making a huge
mistake, and is almost certainly a causal factor in *decreasing* the
overall quality of the product. We, like all software developers I
know, live or die by the quantity and quality of bug reports that we
get. In order to properly balance the effort spent on fixing bugs to
adding new features, we need to know how often people are running into
problems in particular areas and how serious the consequences are
(i.e., are there workarounds, does a problem just affect development
or also the quality of apps you release, etc.) Anything that
decreases either of these (other than maybe pulling off the miracle of
releasing a defect-free product ;-) is a serious threat to our very
survival, and I for one believe that releasing a complete list of all
bug reports and responses will decrease both.
Regards,
Scott
PS: I also consider even public reporting of bugs to be a bad idea,
but I'm in some disagreement with the folks at RR about this. The way
I see it, public reporting a) decreases everyones perception of the
quality of the product, most importantly that of potential customers
and b) makes it impossible to use reports to prioritize development
because you can't tell the difference between an obscure problem that
only one person is running into from problems that *everyone* is
running into. Public reporting may, from time to time, save you the 5
minutes it takes to report a bug by eliminating duplication (but I'd
argue that even keeping up with the reports of bugs in QT when you're
not even using that ends up costing you more time in the long
run). But it's a poor tradeoff IMHO, compared with the possibility
that even one bug you run into doesn't get fixed because it wasn't
assigned a high enough priority.
> Ben Rubinstein | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cognitive Applications Ltd | Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
> http://www.cogapp.com | Fax : +44 (0)1273-728866
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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