Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> Anyway, let me rewrite this in my favorite and brutally honest style; but
> please don't it personal, I am just saying exactly what I am thinking:
> 
No problem. 

> I don't want to get personal, and I don't know your background, but if you
> think about bug fixes as "simple", you either never had to fix bugs, or
> you don't know anything about software development. 
>
Well, neither is true. I've been writing code during a decade now, 
currently O(1Mb) per year and I know that fixing the bugs in the code 
can take you 5 hours for something as stupid as a missing semicolon. 

What I was referring to with "simple bug fix" was a patch which 
does changes to O(1) lines to fix some bug and which is pretty trivial 
to understand. We had several such bugs in POVRay. 

It was to say that the patches are "simple" to understand and "simple" to 
integrate into the code. 

I did not say that they were "simple" to find. But for some of them 
even that is true because I accidentally found them because I read the 
code and not because I saw the bug appearing in program behaviour. 

> I know absolutely no
> professional (who I know isn't a fool, and even they usually have realised
> fixing bugs is hard) that considers fixing bugs something that is simple.
>
Fixing a bug which is only known by misbehaviour can be extremely hard. 
Fixing a bug which you see in the source code _can_ be extremely easy. 
Or it can open your eyes for a huge design flaw which demands a large-scale 
rewrite. I already had both cases myself...

> So, given I know very little about you, using only what you say to judge
> the validity of your arguments, your statement about "simple bug fixes"
> does not give those arguments much credibility...
> 
Then re-read them with my actual intend (as explained above) in mind :)

Wolfgang

Post a reply to this message