Re: "Hyperthreading" problems

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 05:29:10PM -0800, Brian Dessent wrote:
>Stephane Donze wrote:
>>If you guys want cygwin to be used by real people, in real life
>>production or development environments, you should go a bit further
>>than "I don't have the problem on my computer, so fix it yourself".  If
>>you don't want to or are not able to pay attention to "real world"
>>bugs, cygwin will probably never be more than an "almost working"
>>program that runs on your computer the time to take nice screenshots,
>>but fails miserably when users try to make it work in the real life.
>
>The real problem here is as follows: Chris and the other core
>developers cannot reproduce the bug on their systems.  The people
>reporting the bug can neither create a simple test case that
>demonstrates it, nor debug the Cygwin internals and point to a specific
>defect.  So until one side of this equation changes nothing is going to
>get fixed, no matter how hard people beg, whine, and plead.  It's not
>about being uncaring or whatever, it's just the way software
>development works.  You can't even start to try to fix something that
>you cannot see or reproduce and have nothing to work with.

I think the thing that is perhaps missing from the equation here, is
that I have tried to take stabs in the dark and fix it a few times but
I've never been successful.  I've also laid awake at nights thinking
about the problem.  I've studied code at various random times in the
hopes that something would jump out at me.  So far, no luck.

It's interesting that the developer has to "go a little further" to fix
this bug while nearly everyone who reports the problem (with at least
one notable exception) is content to just regurgitate the same
complaints and wait.  It doesn't seem like this technique is working
very well but people keep trying it.

cgf

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