4 ms·

Xamarin is hardly a monopoly in any market. What am I missing?

aaronbrethorst 12y ago
Nothing. I think the author may be tossing that word around just a wee bit unfairly. I liked Miguel de Icaza's measured, helpful way of saying 'get bent': Exception stack traces are the easiest problems for us to fix. But we need to get a copy of the exception. Would you be so kind of filing a bug every when you get those exceptions? Whatever settings you have or environment you are using is different than mine, and I have not experienced those problems personally.
- eropple 12y ago
  I might get some flak for this, because while I respect the hell out of Miguel we've never seen eye to eye when we've talked (he's called me a troll twice, I'm very proud of that), I think that's a huge cop-out. I chafe real hard when Miguel says "file a bug and we'll look at it", because...Xamarin's taking money. When you're taking money, it's no longer "we the community," it's "you the profit-seeking organization." It's their problem, not my problem. Xamarin (and Novell before them) have not done a good job of managing a Mono community, even aside from hiring a big chunk of the community and wondering where the community up and went. They've burned the community at times (and don't get me wrong, I understand why that happens, but it does still happen) and they're clearly spending most of their effort on their commercial stuff. Which is cool, but you lose a lot of the "please file a bug" pull. Expecting people to go sign up for your bug tracker and blah blah blah about a bug in your basically-commercial software is such a fundamental failure to understand people that to me it's pretty much a statement that no, you don't care. If you're seriously interested in fixing bugs people kvetch about on Twitter, get your developer relations people (you have developer relations people, right? (if not, why not?)) to send an email and do the legwork around a bug. And frankly, I feel like "file a bug with an exception trace" is a method of symptomatic treatment rather than the fairly core auditing and testing that most of the Xamarin software I run into on a semi-regular basis really needs. From the outside, a lot of it feels rotten. Picking off an exception here or there doesn't seem likely to cure the disease, it just lances a boil or two.
  - srean 12y ago
    ..and his position that proper tail call elimination is an irrelevant detail did not help the F# cause on Mono. Some people just dont get how important tail call eliminations are in some languages, "just write loops" is not a substitute, not even close.
  - migueldeicaza 12y ago
    This is the bug report you provided: Nice updates to Xamarin Studio. Too bad they can't fix that pesky "indenting pukes on itself" or "lines disappearing in the editor". And all I did was ask you for information about this, purely because I had not experienced it myself: @edropple bug report please But for the record, you do not need to sign up for our bug tracking system. You can email your concerns, complains to support@xamarin.com who will be happy to shepherd your problem through our developers. As for filing the bug with the exception: I am merely trying to prioritize someone with a bug right then. We do get crash reports with the exceptions, and we go through those and fix those. The only reason to ask for the exception is to provide you with better support and address your fix faster.

Nothing. I think the author may be tossing that word around just a wee bit unfairly. I liked Miguel de Icaza's measured, helpful way of saying 'get bent': Exception stack traces are the easiest problems for us to fix. But we need to get a copy of the exception. Would you be so kind of filing a bug every when you get those exceptions? Whatever settings you have or environment you are using is different than mine, and I have not experienced those problems personally.

eropple 12y ago
I might get some flak for this, because while I respect the hell out of Miguel we've never seen eye to eye when we've talked (he's called me a troll twice, I'm very proud of that), I think that's a huge cop-out. I chafe real hard when Miguel says "file a bug and we'll look at it", because...Xamarin's taking money. When you're taking money, it's no longer "we the community," it's "you the profit-seeking organization." It's their problem, not my problem. Xamarin (and Novell before them) have not done a good job of managing a Mono community, even aside from hiring a big chunk of the community and wondering where the community up and went. They've burned the community at times (and don't get me wrong, I understand why that happens, but it does still happen) and they're clearly spending most of their effort on their commercial stuff. Which is cool, but you lose a lot of the "please file a bug" pull. Expecting people to go sign up for your bug tracker and blah blah blah about a bug in your basically-commercial software is such a fundamental failure to understand people that to me it's pretty much a statement that no, you don't care. If you're seriously interested in fixing bugs people kvetch about on Twitter, get your developer relations people (you have developer relations people, right? (if not, why not?)) to send an email and do the legwork around a bug. And frankly, I feel like "file a bug with an exception trace" is a method of symptomatic treatment rather than the fairly core auditing and testing that most of the Xamarin software I run into on a semi-regular basis really needs. From the outside, a lot of it feels rotten. Picking off an exception here or there doesn't seem likely to cure the disease, it just lances a boil or two.
- srean 12y ago
  ..and his position that proper tail call elimination is an irrelevant detail did not help the F# cause on Mono. Some people just dont get how important tail call eliminations are in some languages, "just write loops" is not a substitute, not even close.
- migueldeicaza 12y ago
  This is the bug report you provided: Nice updates to Xamarin Studio. Too bad they can't fix that pesky "indenting pukes on itself" or "lines disappearing in the editor". And all I did was ask you for information about this, purely because I had not experienced it myself: @edropple bug report please But for the record, you do not need to sign up for our bug tracking system. You can email your concerns, complains to support@xamarin.com who will be happy to shepherd your problem through our developers. As for filing the bug with the exception: I am merely trying to prioritize someone with a bug right then. We do get crash reports with the exceptions, and we go through those and fix those. The only reason to ask for the exception is to provide you with better support and address your fix faster.