Re: Re: SmartEiffel shortcomings?

In <OFCEEEFA53.BB898FAC-ONC125700D.0049B433-C125700D.004CDF35@mpsa.com>, [email protected] typed:
> Mike Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I've had code accepted by the smarteiffel team. It's a PITA.
> What does "a PITA" mean?

Pain In The Ass.

> > First you post the patches to smartzilla. After a couple of weeks of
> > nothing happening, you bitch about the fact that nobody has even
> > looked at it. After doing that two or three times, it may - just
> > may - get a response. More likely, the bug report will be closed with
> > no explanation of what was wrong with the code. Then you find a bug in
> > the original code, and get no - zero - nada - zip - none - credit for
> > having written the code in the first place. You have to go through the
> > same process as you did before.
> I don't get it. You want to credit yourself for finding bugs in your own 
> code? Where's the catch?

Having written the code in the first place, I should know it better
than anyone else. Patches for bugs in code I wrote should therefore
get better treatment than other patches. And that's the behavior I see
from other projects. Of course, they also have tools in place to
notice that somone submitted code, and track that for future bug
reports.

> Out of curiosity, I queried your smartzilla bugs (reporter: mwm) The 
> results are:
>         33 bugs, out of which
>                 23 (70%) are FIXED
>                 3 are INVALID, with an explanation

One "explanation" is "this is just a closed conversation". That's not
an explanation - that's just a comment.

>                 2 are DUPLICATE which is an explanation by itself
>                 1 is WONTFIX, with a clear explanation
>                 3 are UNCONFIRMED
>                 1 is NEW

Note that these statistics include simple bug reports as well as
submitted code, so your statistics are out of whack for what I talked
about.

> So, where is the problem with your bugs? The 4 (12%) not yet fixed?

I'll confess, it's not as bad as I remember it. Most of the patches
(look for [PATCH] in the summary line) seem to have been accepted -
one even quickly - possibly with modifications. The one that's still
outstanding is the one where I was fixing a bug in code I submitted in
the first place.

At this point, I think it's appropriate to point out that the SE team
has no documentation on how to contribute code. I had to swipe the
[PATCH] convention from another project. If you really want people to
contribute code, you should tell them *how*.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <[email protected]>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.