I can only speak from my experience. There is a Maxima bug tracker. If I find what I think is a bug, I do not look at the bug list. I also do not look at it "pre-emptively" to have in my mind a list of things I should not expect to work. I do not know for sure, but I doubt that when Dr. David Kirkby reported what he thought were Maxima bugs, he bothered to look either.
It is not part of my job description to survey bugs, though if someone asks me if this behavior (of a program I wrote) is a bug or a feature, I would ordinarily respond. That does not happen automatically via the trac system, does it? For many years the MIT Macsyma system had a public bug list; in some sense the code was open, since anyone could read (or write) any file on the ITS system. Yet no one else ran ITS so it was in some other sense proprietary to MIT. It would not have made sense to have a secret bug list since nothing on that system had any security, except via obscurity. RJF On Aug 29, 7:36 am, Volker Braun <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sunday, August 28, 2011 11:32:56 PM UTC-4, rjf wrote: > > > Let me see if I understand this right. You are campaigning to have > > bug lists available (sure, why keep them secret?). My claim is that > > in practice this is not as useful as one might initially think. > > I also posted an example from my experience where access to the bug tracker > for a commercial piece of software was very helpful for my work. Even though > I could only see the bug that I reported, and that this privilege was paid > for handsomely. > > While we do appreciate your input, it would be nice if you could > substantiate your counterclaim... -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
