Re: Bug Database?

[Frank Schmitt <ich@frank-schmitt.net>]

Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz> writes:

>  > He did not say anything about the amount of work required.  
>
> In the sentence before your quote he said:
>
>  Frank> I looked at the code and while I wasn't able to do the fix myself, I
>  Frank> think for someone who knows gdb's internal, the fix wouldn't be much
>  Frank> work
>
>  >                                                           Whether it
>  > is easy or hard affects what the project leaders need to do, but
>  > either way they should exercise leadership to get it fixed.
>
> Templates aren't GDB's only shortcoming.  I could say GDB/MI is broken.  Others
> would say it's weak at debugging multi-threaded programs.  Frank appears to be
> saying "I want GDB to work well with C++ templates but I don't want to work on
> it, so somebody else should or we should make life unpleasant for them.".
> Maybe annoying the people who do contibute to free software is exercising
> leadership, I wouldn't know.

What I wanted to state is: A free project (especially if it doesn't have
any capable free competitors (like gcc, gdb, the Linux kernel, to a
lesser degree Mozilla)) has a responsibility to deliver code which
fulfills the promises regarding functionality the project makes. Gdb
states that it "allows you to see what is going on `inside' another
program while it executes" and that "The program being debugged can be
written in C, C++, Pascal, Objective-C (and many other languages)".

Telling the user base "If you want the software to behave as advertised,
fix it" is both common in free software and bad style as most users just
can't do this.

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