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What I found horrible was kind of an opposite experience with a bug. There was a developer who built a really powerful project on an aging framework. You could

What I found horrible was kind of an opposite experience with a bug. There was a developer who built a really powerful project on an aging framework. You could do amazing things with this software; the results were always impressive, but the underlying framework and its tools made the experience a bit less than "slick" on modern computer systems. So the very nice community that had risen around this software kept shrinking due to competing projects drawing people away. Eventually, things got really stagnant, but the developer just didn't seem to notice or care and kept shipping code, slowly as usual. Finally he pushed some big changes to the software, made an announcement, and members of the community _really_ woke up. "Finally, the features I've been waiting for!" "Wow, thanks for squashing all these bugs!" These people had been subscribed to the mailing lists for over a decade and thought it polite to reply and express appreciation and admiration at this recent--and huge--development. Six months later, the developer posted to the general list. His message was brief and to the point. There had been a showstopper bug, he said, and today he was providing an updated release with the fix. Looking closer at the announcement, I realized that the bug meant the latest version of the software _could not perform its intended function_. At all. Completely broken. So: No one--not a single person (self included)--except the main developer had even given his big release a try. And _he_ hadn't even tried it for ~6 months! This made me feel really awful for the developer. Fortunately, today people still use the software and have since shared their results & appreciation. But I will always wonder if the developer felt that experience as hard as I did, or even worse.

oblio 10y ago
Is it a Tcl project by any chance?
Declanomous 10y ago
Well, if it was on Linux, it could have been that people were excited for the release, but it wasn't available on their distro's repo yet. I've definitely been really excited for a feature and then discovering it doesn't work once it's available in my repo 6 months later. As much as I like the repo system (and C), I was pretty impressed by an experience I had a little while ago. I found a bug in Atom after a new release. I was able to track down the cause in about an hour, and the person who made the commit that caused the bug fixed it an hour later. The bug fix release was available within 24 hours or so. I don't know JS or Coffeescript, but it was verbose enough that I was able to track down the bug and get it fixed without having to wait for the bug to be accepted upstream, or download and compile the package. Compiling a package isn't hard, but I only do it for the software I really want the most recent version of.

oblio 10y ago

Is it a Tcl project by any chance?

Declanomous 10y ago

Well, if it was on Linux, it could have been that people were excited for the release, but it wasn't available on their distro's repo yet. I've definitely been really excited for a feature and then discovering it doesn't work once it's available in my repo 6 months later. As much as I like the repo system (and C), I was pretty impressed by an experience I had a little while ago. I found a bug in Atom after a new release. I was able to track down the cause in about an hour, and the person who made the commit that caused the bug fixed it an hour later. The bug fix release was available within 24 hours or so. I don't know JS or Coffeescript, but it was verbose enough that I was able to track down the bug and get it fixed without having to wait for the bug to be accepted upstream, or download and compile the package. Compiling a package isn't hard, but I only do it for the software I really want the most recent version of.