clarification on my bugs...

[Richard Gaskin]

Meitnik at aol.com wrote:
> Richard is a good and bright man and i was not refering to him with my 
> subject line but a figure of speach.... carry on richard with your wit and wisdom...

That was very kind of your, Andrew, but not needed.  I didn't take your
last post personally, though I do appreciate your sensitivity to such
things.

One thing to remember with bug-fixing prioritization is the difference
in perspective from the reporter and the fixer.

For myself, I'd really love to see #624 addressed, and I feel strongly
that it should be.  But if it's not the highest priority on their list I
have to understand:  it's only useful to the subset of people making
pointer-tool driven layout interfaces, which I'll admit is a relatively
small minority of all the thousands of Rev users.

 From their perspective, they have to look at the big picture of all
outstanding bugs and feature requests, and strike a balance among them
which most satisfies the greatest number of people.  Recognizing that
it's the nature of complex systems to have at least a few outstanding
bugs in a release, on balance they addressed 70% of outstanding bugs
between v2.2 and v2.5, and continue to make good progress on bugs while
also satisfying demand for new features.

When determining which bugs will be left outstanding, if they're like
most companies they evaluate them by the severity of the bug and on the
number of people affected by them.  A bug that stops work or loses data
will likely get high priority even if few people are affected, and a bug 
that may seem minor but affects everyone may get quicker attention than 
more significant issues that are very rarely reproduced.

Win95 simply isn't used by many people these days.  It's 9 years old,
and Rev is outdoing Microsoft in even attempting to support it.  It may
be that the best solution for Rev would be to drop "Win95" from the list
of officially supported platforms, but to be honest most of the things I
build with Rev continue to work on Win95; it's really only the XML
component and a small handful of other issues, and most of them will not
affect many people.  I understand that it's important to you, but to be 
fair you must understand that you're among a very small number of people 
that are affected by Win95 issues.

One aspect of measuring relative severity of bugs is whether a 
workaround exists.  With the drag-and-drop bug I agree that it should be 
addressed for consistency, but I'll wager there's a way to get what you 
need today if you'll describe what you're looking for.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com