[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-31 15:35:09 +0000, David Froble said:

> seasoned_geek wrote:

>> What is severely lacking in the Linux world is professionalism.

Have you offered to send hardware, or have you worked out the problem 
and the fix and sent along a pull request?    Or have you forked some 
of the code and started to maintain it yourself?   Because that's how 
open source works.  Or how it sometimes doesn't work.

At least if you're not paying for support from one of the larger 
providers, or not paying your own folks to deal with the software, as 
both approaches would potentially provide you with some recourse for 
problems and issues identified.

Your configuration looks fairly specialized — old serial devices, old 
parallel printers — and not something that's using typical hardware, 
too.  Which means those get less or little testing.

You're not the first that has had complaints about the difficulty of 
extracting fixes from free code from unpaid volunteers, either.

If your production is important enough to warrant it, you can get 
"four-walls" support contracts from some major vendors.  Those aren't 
cheap.  But they're available.

>> All of the little script kiddies actually coding want to put "Added 
>> feature X to package Y" on their resume and not one of them wants to 
>> fix bugs with other people's code.

Sure.  I'm certainly not fond of wading into an unfamiliar software 
package and fixing bugs either, but sometimes that's part of getting my 
own work done expeditiously.   Yes, I've sent diffs upstream for most 
of those cases, too.   Sometimes it means recoding something of mine.   
Sometimes the more intractable bugs have meant porting some code to a 
different package or platform.

As much as I'd sometimes like the era of all IT from International 
Computer or General Computer or Digital Computer back again — where 
those folks provide the complete package of custom hardware and bespoke 
software and one-call-away support services, and with little or no 
open-source involved — all usually provided at no small cost, of course 
— well, that world just isn't returning.  That era was also a rather 
big mess, too.

>> Even if you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the bug is theirs they 
>> will let the bug report rot in bugzilla while they go off adding new 
>> stuff, unless they can kick the bug to an up-stream maintainer so they 
>> get credit for closing it and still avoid doing anything.

Or a more widely-known ad decade-old version: 
<http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>

> This was a rather funny read.  Mostly because I don't use any of that 
> *ux shit.  What you write is one of the reasons I don't.
> 
> Got a solution for you.  Keep those bug reports going.  Increase the 
> number as much as you can.  Ought to be plenty of room for expansion. 
> The people getting them will learn who is "bugging" them, and soon 
> begin to ignore you.  Then you will no longer get back any of those 
> really stupid replies.
> 
> :-)

Can't say my experiences with Unix are similar, but then the Unix 
platform I most often deal with has decent vendor support.

Yes, there are stupidities within all of the platforms I deal with, 
too.  Including OpenVMS.

Not sure that any of the above is specific to the hardware architecture 
underneath the particular software, of course.

As my aunt had posted in her kitchen: "the first complainer is the next 
meal's cook".  Don't like something?  Fix it.  Or pay for a fix.



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