On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 11:43:28PM +0200, Anand Buddhdev wrote: > On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 04:29:31PM -0400, Courier User wrote: > > > Of course people should upgrade their OS's. But I don't see why > > it is so important to avoid making a small and effective change > > to share/courierctl.start that will prevent this bug from biting > > people in the future. > > You're right. This small change would make the script more robust, > and Sam might even make the change. It's just that you attacked > him by saying his script was not portable, whereas it is. Had you > approached the situation by proposing a bug in sh, and asking Sam > for a fix to the script to make it more robust, he would probably > have accepted it happily. Remember that he's doing a lot of hard > work, and accusing him of distributing incorrect without proper > justification will only make him more defensive. Do you blame him?
There was no personal attack intended in anything I said. I tried to be very polite, but apparently my use of the phrase "not portable" was taken as an attack, which was not my desire at all. I've been writing software for 33 years, and people tell me all sorts of things about the code I write. Telling me that it doesn't appear to be portable is never something I take personally. That is why it never occurred to me that Sam would take this as a personal affront. But statements in writing do not always come across in the way that they are intended, since the tone of voice or the eye contact that is necessary to convey the emotions that go along with the words are not present in writing. If Sam and I were face to face when I made my "not portable" statement, it would have been amply clear to him by the way that I said it that this was not a personal attack. So therefore, Sam (if you happen to be reading this), I never meant my "not portable" statement to be any kind of personal attack or statement about the quality of your code. If I thought that you might have taken it this way, I would have expressed it differently. And therefore, I apologize for giving you the false impression that I was attacking you personally or disparaging the quality of your code, which I believe is excellent. It should be noted that my original message was a statement of a problem that I was having concerning the DEFAULTDELIVERY variable. In this original message, I was polite and very thorough about explaining the problem and what I was trying to do in order to diagnose it. I sent that message yesterday, and then after many hours of debugging, I wrote the follow-up, which explained that I had found the 'sh' problem. In other words, I did the following things: 1. I encountered a problem. 2. I reported the problem in detail, and very asked if anyone had any ideas about what could be causing it. 3. After reporting the problem, I spent many hours of painstaking debugging, going through the Courier source code (which I had no knowledge of up until now), trying to isolate and diagnose the cause of the symptom I was seeing. 4. Finally, after a nearly an entire night and then half a day more of investigation, I discovered the 'sh' problem. 5. I followed up to my own original post and told the mailing list about my findings, and instead of complaining, I offered a solution. 6. Sam replied and told me that I shouldn't make "guesses". 7. I followed up again, this time emailing the results of some of the investigations that I had previously done and which illustrated more clearly why I came to the conclusion I did about the problem. 8. The rest of this email exchange followed. Therefore, I believe that I took a very constructive approach in trying to solve this problem. Instead of just complaining and posting a "help me!" message, I did my own painstaking investigation and finally came up with a workable solution to the problem, which I then reported here for the benefit of all. There was no intention to hurt anyone's feelings or to disparage anyone's code. And once again, I apologize for unintentionally doing so (if indeed this is how you felt, Sam). > -- > Anand Buddhdev > Personal site: http://anand.org -- Courier User [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas - http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm?source=osdntextlink _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
