Re: Installation on windows (fwd)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

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On 2005-03-16 18:50:50 +0000 Alex Perez <address@hidden> wrote:

> Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > On 2005-03-16 06:06:11 +0000 Sheldon Gill <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > I've a range of "problems" regarding GNUstep in respect to the file 
> > > system, some of which are wishes for better behaviour but some are 
> > > certainly what I'd categorize as bugs. These "wishes" aren't restricted 
> > > to 
> > > the windows environment either.
> >
> >
> > Perhaps starting with reporting individual bugs would make sense ... since
> > they generally only get fixed if people know about them, and a problem
> > broken down into individual parts is much easier to deal with.
> <StandardAlexInflammatoryStyle>Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong 
> </StandardAlexInflammatoryStyle> or at least not all of the time. Systemic 
> problems require systemic solutioins.
>
> The does not simply apply to programming, either.

Yep ... inflammatory :-)

Of course systemic problems require systemic solutions ... but that in no
way invalidates the point.

To quote Einstein  'Everything should be as simple as possible, but no
simpler'.

If you see a systemic problem as a mass of bugs rather than a single bug
with a lot of symptoms, that's a basic error in your viewpoint.

Now, as a great example of a systemic problem being fixed, lets look at the
state of the gui some years ago.  It was full of glitches in the drawing,
and we identified the view coordinate transformation code as being incorrect
... of course, in order to make things more or less work, the rest of the
code by then contained hacks to compensate for the underlying bug.

When you considered all those hacks too ... the total number of things to
fix looked huge and unmanagable.  One person quit the project in part over
the argument about what to do ... he wanted to continue hacking the code fix
individual symptoms ...but, having isolated the root cause of our problems
in the coordinate transformations, we went ahead and fixed the main
coordinate transformation code.  This broke all those other hacks and made
the gui completely unusable for a few weeks, but the code quickly recovered
and went on to be a really usable library where before we had been
essentially stuck for a couple of years!

This is a perfect example of isolating an individual bug in such a way that
everyone could understand the issue, where trying to fix that bug AND all
the existing code which depended on it in one go just couldn't happen.

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