[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[seasoned_geek]

On Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 11:25:20 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
> 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.

I bought 6 different modems with different chipsets and offered to test. After N check-ins of code to the repository which wouldn't compile for multiple people I even offered to ship the modems to the "maintainer" but his response made it pointless. He was developing on a laptop so he didn't even have a machine the cards could be installed in.

> 
> 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.

Ubuntu is the group which runs the marketing slogan "Just works," then they pull this. Why? because it is something they don't use.

> 
> 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.

Why I still have a parallel printer and up until recently had a serial printer, I only use them when writing scale software for one business or another. Dot Matrix is the typical hardware at every scale for every landfill, transfer station, grain elevator, and river terminal in the country. The scales at truck stops aren't used for import/export/transfer so they probably use some kind of thermal thing because a driver is only looking to avoid an axle weight limit ticket (which can be really expensive). That is the reason you still see OfficeMax listing 76 dot matrix printers. There are various legal requirements for the stuff to be printed on preprinted pre-numbered multi-part forms.

http://www.officedepot.com/a/browse/dot-matrix-printers/N=5+644952/

(I didn't page through all of the results. They said 76 and the first page was all of the familiar dot matrix printers.)


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

I don't care if they are busy or whatever. What honks me off to no end are the distros who earn money selling support that let people who have NO POSSIBLE WAY OF TESTING SOMETHING be the maintainer.

Okay, I was well and truly honked off when the "volunteer maintainer" sent me a bill for many thousands of dollars to fix something which was busted in an LTS release. That kind of bait and switch just punches a button with me.

The serial and parallel stuff got "fixed" only for locations with computers new enough to have USB because the USB maintainers saw just how wrong it was to suddenly drop serial and parallel support. They quickly hacked in some fixes to make those USB-Serial and USB-Parallel cables work. That still left a large portion of users hanging.

 
> 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.

I'm not fond of it, but when a person volunteers to be a maintainer, that is exactly what they volunteered for.

> 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.

While I don't like Oracle, it is too bad they chose RedHat instead of a Ubuntu fork. That is almost exactly what Oracle is attempting to do. (Okay, they are also attempting to put RedHat out of business, but that is a different issue.) They are attempting to have a single point of contact for their Linux and to support a certified list of hardware, or at least that's what I have understood from their press.

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

Great link!