Russ wrote: > Folks, > > I'm truly sorry that so many feathers got ruffled in this thread. Let's > see if I can put this thing to rest gracefully.
I too am tired of this and I apologize to you (Russ) for jumping into it and for this (hopefullly last) followup. But the same thing happened here a short time ago and in that incident too, someone who made a suggestion was attacked and charged unjustifiably with rudeness. In neither that case nor this did anyone protest the unjustness and hypocrisy that was blatant. So this time I could not sit idly and watch. To summarize the "insults" subtread (for closure) An observation was made about a suboptimal error message and a suggestion about how to improve it made in good faith. (Even harebrained suggestions deserve a non-insulting explanation of why they're not a good idea, and this was not harebrained.) This resulted in a suggestion to "submit a patch". The response was (correctly) that it was not a viable suggestion. (characterized by "silly" hardly a strong epithet on usenet), that it would be "trivial" to fix and should "take 2 minutes" by someone with the requisite experience (obviously an opinion, not a claim, since the OP said in the same post that he was unfamiliar with Python internals). Obviously it takes more than two minutes. This was a usenet post for god's sake, not a PhD dissertation. And "trivial" is used almost as slang by many computer and science types and means "very easy" (as if you didn't know). o it is reasonable to question the description "trivial" and ask what actually would need to be done. It is not reasonable to be insulted by it. o Anyone who honestly interprets "two minutes" as 120 seconds should seek clinical help. A reasonable reading if this is that "it would take someone who works on Python internals regularly orders of magnitude less time than me, and with a higher probability of getting it right." Sorry folks. that is a factually true statement. Nothing to do with your time is less valuable than mine. More imaginary insults. The OP was blameless in this thread and this was another case the regulars here overreacting to imagined (or deliberately misinterpreted) "insults" that were not there. One can speculate that this serves a purpose of suppressing interference from "outsiders" in the development process. Or maybe it is just the alpha dogs asserting their authority. Either way, it should not be allowed to pass uncriticised. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
