re: When do regressions become high priority for developers?
Matt Perry wrote:
When do regressions become high priority for developers? [SecureCRT broke with wine-0.9.54, http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13583 ] 14 months seems to be more than reasonable to repair a regression.
That's a tough question. Note that Photoshop CS3 installer has been busted for months, and is in a similar limbo. (We even know how to fix it, but nobody has time at the moment.) Often people will fix regressions that pop up after their changes. In this case, the developer is no longer around. Also, this regression might be a 'we exposed a hole in wine' rather than a plain old bug, so the fix might mean writing a bunch of new code. In this case, the previous version of the app works under Wine, so perhaps that makes a fix less urgent. Sometimes it helps to attract the attention of the app's developer. I'll ping them and see what they say, maybe they can tell us where we're going wrong. Occasionally one of the true hotshots (like AF) will take an interest and diagnose the cause. That makes it a lot easier to fix, the cost to fix the bug becomes much less uncertain, and if some company needs the app to work, a paid fix becomes more affordable at that point. But even with that, sometimes it's ages before the bug bubbles up to the top of anyone's priorities. I wish I had a better answer for you! - Dan
That's a tough question. Note that Photoshop CS3 installer has been busted for months Yep, the same problem busts the CS4 installer as well, so both CS3 and CS4 has gone from working(with tricks, practically flawless in CS4s case) to non-installable. From what I have understood, this is not really a regression, but rather a redesign which have caused the application to fail to install. I would not weigh Perrys problem against mine(not that I think CSx are low-profile apps), but rather say that regressions seems to be more ok when the cause is a redesign, and not when it is a common bug.
I would not agree with that, though. This project is, for good reason, very cautious about accepting patches of bugs and should also be so with new functionality. Now I am not aware of the reasons for the redesign, they might be valid, but I would still think that we could learn from this in some way. If not a policy, but maybe some kind of way to tell the community of things like this happening? Yes, the development versions are development versions in the projects view, however, the community treats them as real releases. Come to think of it, the project does it as well. Bug reports regarding the release version are somewhat frowned upon. Isn't that a sign that major releases are a bit too far apart? //Nicklas PS. This is especially annoying since I've just had a positive conversation with Adobe about helping out with providing a download location for atmlib.dll so that Dan and Austin could include it into winetricks, removing the last really unsafe step of the installation. I just hope they don't watch the appdb. But then I am a developer, so I hardly notice frustration anymore. :-) DS.
participants (2)
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Dan Kegel -
Nicklas Börjesson