On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> At 06:48 AM 1/13/00 , Jerzy wrote:
> > Modifying source codes of your development tools is clearly a
> > pathology if not a perversion. It diverts you from your principal
> > task which should *exploit* those tools.
>
> I'm glad to finally find someone saying this in this forum. I was very
> close to unsubscribing from the Haskell list because it looked an awful lot
> like it was turning into an FSF soapbox.
As usually, there are two sides of the same coin.
It's hard not to notice all the advantages of the open source
delivery and of the bazaar-type collaboration in software
development - Linux and internet being just the two good examples.
I have been a taker and a giver in this scheme over the years,
and I am glad it exists.
On the other hand, lack of any serious quality control
seems to me the biggest menace in this scheme. Poor, outdated
or meaningless documentation and never ending upgrades with
never ending lists of new bugs force a casual user to become an
expert in each and every piece of software that she/he intends
to compile, install or use. [It does not mean that all commercial
programs are any better in this respect. Some are, many are not.]
And here I agree with Jerzy that - in a name of a private
or public progress - we should not have to be bothered
with fixing somebody else's bugs, no re-invent some basic
algorithms, such as "line drawing algorithm", over and over again.
I do not want to become an expert in all those updates
of Mozilla or GTK, I just want to use one of their reasonably
stable version if I can. I am grateful that someone does it
for me, and I try to repay it somehow to the best of my
ability.
But the reality is sometimes not so rosy. If anyone is
interested, I have prepared a lengthy hair-raising example
that documents the above:
http://www.numeric-quest.com/haskell/cleaner.html
A conclusion is that before we start glowing in glory of our
own achievements we should clean our own work first. And that
applies to FSF as well, as shown in the example.
Jan
