Re: Latest Cygwin Release 5 month old...

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Linda Walsh wrote:

>     Nobody like to hear "oh, it's fixed in the latest build, but
> not in the released product."

Whether they like it or not doesn't change the situation at all.  The
fact remains that very often reported problems are fixed in snapshots,
so saying "try a snapshot first" is a very effective way to save a lot
of time on the part of both the person with the problem and the people
on the list that take the hours out of their day to try to help.  And
isn't that the goal of everyone posting to the list with problems, to
resolve them quickly?  This is a single DLL file we're talking about,
not a linux kernel, and it takes seconds to replace and doesn't require
a reboot.

>     If a developer doesn't think it is good enough to release,
> then I'm not sure I want to be testing on my "production" machine.
> Not everyone has a spare test machine.

That kind of logic is toxic poison to an open source project.  How do
you think those releases come to be?  If you want stable releases then
you need to regularly test snapshots and give feedback, otherwise the
releases will not be of high quality.  This is all a volunteer effort
here, and the developers' only way of assessing whether their fixes are
effective and stable is by hearing from people on the list that try
them.  If everyone played the "I'm not going anywhere near something
that doesn't have the mythical release stamp of approval" card then no
forward progress would ever be made, and you'd have a lot of really
buggy releases.

Brian

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