Reporting Metacard Bugs

[J. Landman Gay]

Bob Warren wrote:

> As a result of Richard's recommendation on the UR-List, here I am!
> (fanfare of trumpets)

Welcome. We can use your experience. Few here are using any flavor of 
Unix, I suspect.

> In Ubuntu, regarding the coding editor, what appears at the top of the 
> window is just the opposite of what appears in Windows: I have a 
> minimize and restore button (which also means that I cannot even drag 
> the window itself to a new position). It also means that the coding I 
> have typed can never be actioned, unless I go to the "File" menu and 
> choose "Apply Script". However, although the script is applied, this 
> does not close the window, and so far I have not discovered how to close 
> it. Very soon, the number of code editors I have open at the same time 
> becomes rather unwieldly.

A single press of the Enter key both saves the script and closes the 
window. Note that this is different behavior than Revolution's, which 
takes two Enter key presses. There are other differences too, which is 
to be expected because the MC IDE is a different animal. Shortcuts to 
open the script editor, for example, are different: Control-Alt-S and 
Control-Alt-C open the stack and card editors respectively. You will 
find yourself developing a split personality if you move between MC and 
Rev IDEs often.


> Above, I have described a single difficulty which indicates that I 
> cannot easily use Metacard under Ubuntu at all at the moment. In order 
> to get such things fixed, where is the most appropriate place for 
> reporting difficulties? Here on the List? If the Metacard equivalent of 
> Bugzilla does not exist, but somebody decides to invent one, I would ask 
> but 2 things:
> 
> 1. That the bug reporting/enhancement request interface should be more 
> user friendly than Bugzilla.
> 
> 2. That it should not include a voting system aimed at evaluating the 
> importance of bugs etc. in the opinion of other users. To me, such a 
> system has various fundamental problems, and the importance of bugs or 
> suggested features should be firmly in the hands of those responsible 
> for the IDE/engine.

This is an open source project, very loosely organized (some might even 
say "not at all organized" :),) with no formal procedures per se and 
only a very few people actively involved in coding (like, a small 
handful.) This list is the only avenue for reports and discussion. 
There is no one "assigned" to fix anything, so if a behavior bothers a 
user enough they have the choice to either fix it themselves and send 
the fixes to Richard Gaskin (who is the currently-designated collector 
of such things) or they can ignore the problem.

Note that one thing we all agree on is that we use the MC IDE for a 
reason -- it has only the most minimal feature set, which means we are 
working directly with the engine with virtually no IDE interference. We 
like that. So we have decided to keep the IDE as unchanged as possible, 
only making corrections as necessary to keep it compatible with the 
latest engine release. This doesn't negate your observations about 
window behavior in Ubuntu; those are obviously fixes, not changes.

That said, we do occasionally add things (the Plugins menu is one of 
those features that did not exist in the original MC IDE.) The procedure 
is to ask about the proposed change here, and if there are no 
objections, the person who wants the change will code it and contribute 
the script to the project.

Progress on changes is usually slow, as most of us have other things we 
do and we only work on the MC IDE when we have time or inclination. But 
your contributions to the 'nix interface would be appreciated, I'm sure. 
You may have to implement them though. ;)

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com