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Re: Serious performance problems (malloc related?)


On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 09:29:54PM -0700, Edward Peschko wrote:
>But Mr.  Faylor, no offense, but you *are* snippy.  You complain about
>lack of clue in bug reports, lack of motivation for people to pick up
>the code and play with it, yet you *constantly* throw cold water on
>people's motivation to feel good about dealing with cygwin.
>
>Just some advice - take a step back and get a good meta-view at
>yourself.

Aren't you the guy who insisted that you had a right to communicate in
private email about some kind of plan to merge MinGW and Cygwin and then
subsequently complained, in multiple messages to the cygwin list, about
the fact that I didn't want to talk to you privately?  I am pretty sure
that's you.  I just like to set the stage when someone starts off on
this type of email.

For the record: I do not give any serious consideration to the two or
three email voices here who think they speak from some sort of moral
high ground and are compelled to tell me how to communicate.  I do very
much appreciate that you haven't lapsed into profanity or sarcasm,
however.

99% of the time when people report a problem they are saying "I have a
problem.  I didn't go to too much effort to figure it out.  I didn't do
any research about how I should report it.  I want you to help me now."
My response to this kind of email is normally to point people to where
they need to go to either fix the problem themselves or provide the
information that we need to fix the problem.  If people don't like the
way I do this, here's something that should be obvious by now: I don't
care.  You can take my response or leave it.

In this case, the OP provided a test case, which is rare (and
appreciated).  They didn't provide any other details other than that,
although he did offer noise information about how he'd rather be using
linux and how this was a serious problem.  He also offered a completely
uninformed guess.

We normally ask for the guidelines from http://cygwin.com/problems.html,
to be followed, however, I know that issues of performance are rarely
cut and dry (although knowing the version of cygwin that was exhibiting
problems would have been interesting) and so the real key here is to
learn enough about the DLL to diagnose the problem.

What you interpret as "snippiness" is just cut and dry advice: If you
have a lot of people relying on a product and the product is misbehaving
then it makes sense to either purchase support or learn enough about it
so that you can support it.  Relying on volunteer email to fix something
which is impacting your whole organization is not a reliable way to get
"serious problems" fixed.

FWIW, the original message violated many of the tenants of Eric Raymond's
"How to Ask Smart Questions" and I responded just like Eric Raymond
predicted.

>There are two ways of seeing it - everybody (or a huge subset of everybody) 
>is wrong and I'm squeaky clean, or yes I could improve my attitude in how
>to deal with people. 

One thing you may notice in my email, is that I normally try to I try to
tell people what they need to do to get results.  I don't normally tell
people that "everyone" thinks a certain way and I don't often make
personal observations about people's character.  I just offer (often
terse) advice on what I think someone should do to solve a problem.

As it turns out, for the most part, the way that I conduct myself
provides me with the results that I want.  The mailing list is fairly
self policing these days.  People who report "cygwin not work" bugs are
directed towards the right way to report a problem and, often, their
problems are fixed.  People who want to contribute are pointed at
cygwin-apps or cygwin-patches and often they end up contributing.

Other people who want to change things but don't have a clear idea about
what they want to do and only know that they are angry because I'm not
nice to them, and won't give their half-formed thoughts the
consideration they know they deserve, eventually go away.  Which is
exactly what I want to happen.

This isn't a democracy.  It's just a successful free software project.
I (and Corinna) get to make the rules and I (we) get to comport myself
how I (we) see fit.  If you don't like that then you can take cygwin
source code and make your own fork.

(And, boy will I be fuming.  That should offer some incentive at least)

>I know this cultural issue has deterred me in the past; I keep hoping that 
>things'll change and I (and possibly many others) would change their mind
>and start assisting cygwin.

I have to confess that I'm *glad* that you are deterred.  IIRC, in your
communication to the cygwin list you rarely demonstrated a real grasp of
the technical issues that you were trying to grapple with.  So, I'm
happy not to have to either witness or correct your misperceptions on a
regular basis.

Oh, and, there you go again.  First it was "everyone" and then it was
"possibly many others".  I believe that this argument style is called
"Appeal to Belief".  You've posted relatively rarely to the cygwin list
and have never, as I mentioned, and as I recall, demonstrated any
particularly strong grasp of either the technical or community aspects
of cygwin so I don't accept your premise that you speak for "everybody"
or "possibly many others".

Not that it would matter if I did.

cgf


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