On Thursday 02 August 2007, Chris Morgan wrote:
Rewriting:
We can conclude that VM was distracted first by the mention of the ies4lin and second by attempts to attribute the problem to ies4lin, and that, because of these distractions, he was unable to assess properly the issue at hand. One also concludes that VM over-relied on the features of the development process automation (bugzilla) and this this was also causel to tine incident since data available from bugzilla effectively masked the real problem.
I also wanted to mention that ies4lin SHOULD be a distraction. If users want to use unsupported tools to modify their configuration do we really want to be debugging those modifications as well as wine issues?
IMHO, you succumb just the same to completely ignoring the real problem at hand. Mind you, flt 006 flight crew was not one person only, yet they were all equally confused (or so it seemed, at least PF and FE were).
Nowhere did the bug reporter indicate that he used ies4lin on the failing configuration.
"Coincidentally, ies4lin, which runs fine on prior versions of Wine, doesn't accept URL line input in 0.9.42."
The user just mentioned this as a coincidence. He then explicitly states:
"InfoSelect is broken on a fresh installation before ies4lin is installed to it"
Then, VM rambles once more and finally says that he's sorry for missing an attachment.
I admit there's a chance that previous installs were not done correctly by WB, just like the #4 engine *did* get hung in flt 006. The deal is that in both cases, the engineer who should have worked the problem did something to exacerbate the issue. VM didn't, IMHO, follow the best approach to get WB to check if he reports the results from a correct install (this is not really documented AFAICS). In 006, the FE didn't follow the correct procedure to un-hang the engine (close bleed air valve).
So, now the bug is on the right track. If what Mikolaj Zalewski suggests to check turns out to be the culprit, this will be, in the end, an easy one. Just like flt 006 was an easy one once the pilots went below the clouds and saw what the airplane was really doing. Either way, most of VMs doing was consistent with being generally confused and not letting the bug-reported reality sink in. Again, this is not an indication of incompetence -- well trained people (IIRC human factors) will tend to do it more than untrained ones, given right combination of external factors (fatigue, etc). Heck, being in a grumpy mood can make you act like this -- as long as it's transient, it's something that one can expect to see and can live with :)
Cheers, Kuba