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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: feedback; bug reports
From:       James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj () acm ! org>
Date:       2007-11-14 23:08:40
Message-ID: 473B7FF8.8020806 () acm ! org
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David Jarvie wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 November 2007 8:58, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
>> On Wednesday 14 November 2007 08:38:43 James Richard Tyrer wrote:
>>> I am starting to feel as though I need to apologize for going to
>>> engineering school and studying EE & CS.  I figure that my instructors
>>> and the text books used were correct and I can pass this knowledge along
>>> unless people think that what is taught in software engineering courses
>>> in college had no validity and that they must learn it themselves by
>>> trial and error.  There is a large body of knowledge on the subject and
>>> it seems foolish to ignore it. I would hope that KDE developers have
>>> read several books on programing and would already know that what I said
>>> is true.
> 
> I'm not complaining about _what_ you say, just the _way_ you say it. I
> haven't been following the subject matter of this thread - what prompted
> me to post a reply was simply the tone of your statement which I felt was
> very harsh on people who have been contributing as best they can. In fact,
> to be blunt myself, as a bystander I found your comment offensive.
> 
> In many cases, contributors don't start off with a blank sheet - the
> software grows from the existing base. Yes, in the ideal world some things
> would be done differently, but people don't have unlimited time and
> resources to do it the way you (or possibly they) would like.

Precisely!  And adopting best design practices would mean that it was 
less work.  As would TQM.  At least in the long run.  I learned the hard 
way that using a kludge will come back to bite you on the ass.

>> We all agree on what you say here. What we don't like are lengthy mails
>> telling us to do this and that, often with sentences we don't even
>> understand.
>> When you say a GUI has poor design, we'd like a patch with a good design.
> 
> Helpful emails with suggestions on how to fix things, and patches, would
> be more likely to produce the results you want. Being too critical in tone
> will tend to put people's backs up, and is likely to produce less result.
> 
Yes, and the out of hand dismissals of my ideas tends to get my back up.

A portion of an e-mail which starts with:

	"my recommendations are"

is *my* _recommendations_ -- my suggestions; how I would do it (actually 
just some first thoughts on how I might do it).  This is not a demand 
that things be changed anymore than a bug report is.

The way that I work -- the way that engineers work -- is that everybody 
makes their suggestions and then we argue about them.  Yes engineers 
argue, but not in a personal way; we argue about how best to do the project.




 
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