bug reports, and lack of feedback (was: make -j1 fails)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Dave Hart wrote on Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 09:49:02AM CET:
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 6:27 PM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > Can you make your project available for us to try and reproduce the bug
> > (I have access to a couple of FreeBSD systems)?  If not, then I'm afraid
> > I'll not be able to pursue this further before seeing a reduced version.
> 
> While you're waiting for that,

FWIW, I was offered non-public access to the code.  Maybe it is helpful
to repeat in public my stance toward this: I treat non-public code, or
public code that is not well-known, rather cautiously, even more so if I
don't know the author(s) well either.  This is not to place mistrust in
any particular person, just application of the internet principle "be
careful in what downloaded stuff you execute", even in a jail.

This means it takes (quite) some initial time to get past a cursory
review of the code for nastiness.

> perhaps you could pursue the problem I
> did take the time to provide a reduced test case for in November:
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2010-11/msg00135.html

> Note that this issue is no longer a problem for NTP -- autogen's
> libopts now provides LIBOPTS_CHECK_NOBUILD, which sidesteps the need
> to conditionalize AC_CONFIG_FILES([libopts/Makefile]), and works
> correctly on Automake 1.10, which doesn't support AM_COND_IF
> conditionalization of AC_CONFIG_FILES.

Good to know.

> I am annoyed no one has taken the time to follow up after I took the
> time to produce a reduced test case illustrating the automake
> misbehavior, and each time I see a request for a reduced repro, I
> wonder what I might have done wrong in anticipating the request and
> providing the reduced test case in the initial report.

I looked at it for maybe half an hour back then, and didn't see an easy
way to fix it.  Sorry.  I should maybe have followed up to let you know.
You didn't do anything wrong, otherwise I would eventually have asked.
But anyway we should've thanked you for the report, so please allow me
to thank you now for the nice and well-written bug report!

Generally, there are more bug reports than there are people looking at
them, analyzing and fixing them.  As is the case in so many free
software projects.  If you are dissatisfied with that, and you have
resources, you are very welcome to help out.  Other than that, I guess I
should encourage using our new-ish debbugs bug tracker (just write to
bug-automake to open a new PR) to be a little more sure issues don't get
lost.

I typically try to make sure rather quickly that a report is complete,
so that when someone eventually gets to it, they have a chance to do
something productive with it even if the original reporter has gone off
to some other pasture in the meantime.

Since you now have a workaround for your bug, I hope you understand that
the priority of it is rather low.  Sorry again, but that's how bug
economics work, necessarily.

Cheers,
Ralf