On Sep 4, 2008, at 10:09, chromatic wrote:
My job is editor, not programmer. Also novelist -- but again, not
programmer.
Certainly not CPAN programmer.
What's your novel? Can I read it?
Paying attention is not my job. Releasing software I've written
under a free
and open license does not instill in me the obligation to jump
whenever a
user snaps his or her fingers.
Well, you can ignore the FAILs. Or you can evaluate each one to
determine if you could change something your code to make it easier
for your users. No one compels you to do anything.
I may do so because I take the quality and utility of my software
seriously,
but do not mistake that for anything which may instill in you any
sort of
entitlement. That is an excellent way not to get what you want from
me.
I don't think anyone would argue that. Straw man, dude.
I don't like this: failure by any other name would smell just as
bad. In
other words, if an end user is not going to have a happy, functional
module after typing install Foo::Bar at the CPAN prompt, this is a
failure
that should be noted as such and fixed by the author.
Then CPAN Testers reports should come with login instructions so
that I can
resurrect decade-old skills and perform system administration to fix
broken
installations and configurations -- oh, and as you say, a truly
*modern*
reporting system should publish these logins and passwords publicly in
syndication feeds.
Huh? I don't think he's referring to configuration issues on the
tester's box. Clearly that's not the author's responsibility. It's the
job of CPAN Testers to try to minimize the FAIL reports for such a
situation, but not your job to change anything when the occasional
invalid FAIL gets through. That's not to say that CPAN Testers
couldn't suggest a way for you as an author to cut down on those
FAILs, but you're not compelled to do anything.
However, by what possible logic can you conclude that the
appropriate way to
get that bug fixed is to report it to people who, given all of the
information detected automatically, *do not* maintain CPAN.pm?
Obviously it's not always easy to identify the source of the bug. It
is the responsibility of CPAN Testers to run the most recent module in
order to minimize such circumstances.
"Oh," perhaps you think, "it's easy for them to read the reports and
diagnose
the problem remotely on machines they have never seen before, did not
configure, and cannot probe -- and it's so easy for them to file a
bug in the
right place!" If you don't think that, precisely what *do* you
think to
produce such a bold assertion that it is Shlomi's job to install and
reconfigure a new version of CPAN.pm for a CPAN Tester -- or for
that matter,
everyone with a misconfigured version of CPAN.pm which contains this
bug?
Straw man again. When I get such a report, I email the CPAN Tester and
say, "WTF?" He usually gets back to me with, "My bad, sorry, won't
happen again."
It's not my "job" to fix bugs in *my own* distributions. I do it
because I
care about quality and, contrary to what appears to be near-
universal belief
around here, I care that people can use my code.
Straw man again. Do you really believe anyone is actually saying that?
Best,
David
