Ondrej, Well, "send a patch or shut up" is pretty much a statement that if you plan to contribute you need to do SOME form of work, if only to get educated about the project you plan to criticise. Criticism is a valuable "patch" if it is well informed.
Axiom has a goal of a new, non-archaic user interface called Crystal. I've spent a fair amount of time researching the subject and creating little test case setups to experiment with ideas. The Crystal effort has been discussed on this list. Had the student taken the time to read the list they might have generated a question, a proposal, or an informed comment about the long term vision of a new user interface. Calling the help system (documented in the axiom book, previously defined, recently fixed and extended to 160 algebra files) "archaic" is easily viewed as (a) uninformed criticism, (b) ignoring the value of being able to actually get help immediately, and (c) failing to scratch one's own itch. Had the student bothered to generate more than a knee-jerk comment we could have had a reasonable design discussion about some subgoal of a radically new help system (e.g. crystal), a previously well research help system (e.g. DWIM), or a porting discussion for hyperdoc to some other platform (e.g. Firefox). Frankly though, "its archaic" is a worthless, effortless, bit of noise. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
