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reporting requirements [Re: does not rebuild Makefile.in]


From: Ilya N. Golubev
Subject: reporting requirements [Re: does not rebuild Makefile.in]
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:50:23 +0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) XEmacs/21.4.21 (linux)

As for the original (not of make) issue, confirming my [not a bug]
posted on Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:49:44 +0400
(<address@hidden>).

As for attitude expressed in your reply of Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:57:21
+0400 (MSD)
(<address@hidden>), it is
pretty widespread in many free sofware mailing lists, fora, so
commenting on it.  You wrote:

> Nice way to be helpful

Followed it with assorted what was this, what was that questions,
followed by

> Are we supposed to just *guess*??!

This may seem justified, and is at least understandable.  And
complying with all of this takes in most cases even more work than
isolating (and even possibly fixing) the bug entirely on one's own.
So the posting becomes pointless.

Sadly, with this particular software issue it was exactly what
happened.

The lesson?

In [[The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress]] (by Robert A. Heinlein) even a
machine

> Mike was designed, even before augmented, to answer questions
> tentatively on insufficient data like you do

> Mike was designed to operate on incomplete data.

People are generally able to do that pretty well.  This is reason for
users posting issues (including me) to hope ones replying to exercise
this ability, rather than request users to supply "complete data" ;-)
.

> You'd rather make people

Posted message by itself makes people do nothing.


Also note the detailed bug description (of Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:43:38
+0400 (<address@hidden>)) on <address@hidden> (and
proposed fix (of Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:43:53 +0400
(<address@hidden>)) on <address@hidden>).  The bug
is shown to be pretty "portable", its manifestation thus does not
depend on (answers to) most of your [what was?] questions.  Trying
random automake input ((source) package) made perfect sense.




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