Re: gEDA-dev: Re: [Gnucap-devel] Gnucap docs build failure on FC5(and other places)

[al davis <ad106-at-NOSPAMfreeelectron_dot_net>]

On Sunday 30 July 2006 09:54, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> As for the person who made the point that the problem was an
> autoconf issue:  If you would care to actually do some work
> and send a patch to fix the configure.ac file instead of
> proferring cheap advice, then I'd stand up and take notice.  
> Otherwise, you're just blowing easy advice out your @ss.
>  Tweaking the autotools so that they do the right thing in
> every case is a difficult job.  You'd know that if you tried
> to do some real implementation.

I have found that usually when a user makes a quick patch, it 
doesn't really work.  Just letting me know there is a problem, 
with enough info that I can reproduce it, is extremely 
valuable.  So far, in all cases, either I can quickly fix it, 
or it is a design issue that I wouldn't expect a non-expert to 
find.

Since you brought up the issue ....  If I find a bug in 
ng-spice, should I report it?  The obvious answer is "yes", but 
if it will be received like this I will just keep it to myself.

How would such a situation come up?   ...  I consider ng-spice 
to be archeological software.  That is, a collection of old 
stuff to be studied like you would study an archeological dig.  
In working on gnucap, I often make comparisons to the 
traditional.  Often this exposes bugs in the programs used as a 
comparison base.  In some cases, I can see exactly what is 
wrong.  Sometimes I just see that something is wrong, but I 
don't bother to find out why.  I found what I wanted to find, 
now it is time to move on.

If there is a bug, should it be fixed?  Maybe not!  Some users 
depend on the bugs.  Maybe fixing it will introduce new bugs.  
Maybe (in the case of ng-spice) fixing something will destroy 
some of the legacy value.


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