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Re: Fixing Bugs (Was: A Suggestion for Release Testing)
On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 10:30:03AM -0400, Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
> Aaron W. LaFramboise wrote:
> > Boosters, FreeBSD hackers, and I'm sure tons of others are calling this
> > the "Bicycle shed effect."
> >
> > <http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING>
>
> If I'm building a bicycle shed, I may want to talk with others who have
> done so in the past, learning from the experience and gaining their
> insights. Why did they use a certain type of construction? What sort of
> storage did they build in? What worked and didn't work for someone else
> who has already built a shed? What did they learn from their own work?
> Any shed I build will be better for such discussions.
You've completely missed the point (rather appropriately). You're
*supposed* to be building a nuclear reactor, but have got preoccupied
discussing the colour of the bicycle shed in which the staff will park
their bikes.
That's what "bicycle shed painting" refers to.
> GCC's floating-point support can be improved by considering what people
> want from their math in conjunction with the characteristics of
> different systems. Discussions herein have clarified and expanded my
> understanding of the issues.
>
> > In all of the open source world I have seen, posting code is always better.
>
> Better than what? Design? Analysis? Just because some people like to
> nitpick doesn't mean there shouldn't be forethought to our work.
The point Aaron is making is that discussion of such topics very rarely
results in any useful design or analysis, because every Tom, Dick and
Harry pipes up to add their 2c, the majority of which are completely
irrelevant. (Look, I'm contributing to it, and I'm completely irrelevant
to the discussion).
If this thread had resulted in any useful design or analysis noone would
mind, but it's turned into a multi-headed beast covering the etiquette
of bugmasters, the names of vapourware compiler switches, and alien
invasion (though that was very funny). Oh, and whether PR323 is a bug,
of course.
The only remaining place this thread can go (before satisfying Godwin's
rule) is for the resident markov generator to correct you all by pointing
out that the linker on MMIX platforms uses UTF-8 for the symbol names.
(what do you mean it's not friday afternoon yet?)
jon