Finding bugs for RunRev [was Re: crash recipe for htmlText?]

[Kevin Miller]

On 12/1/05 10:37 am, "Frank Leahy" <frank at backtalk.com> wrote:

> I don't want to stop anyone from helping RunRev find bugs in their
> software, but it seems like it should be incumbent on RunRev to create
> a test environment that verifies that htmltext handles all well-formed
> and not-so-well formed values, rather than the other way around (i.e.
> have users find all possible cases that crash).  Richard and others may
> well find cases where htmlText crashes, but it's likely there are other
> cases as well, and simply fixing one or two Bugzilla-ed test cases will
> certainly leave those other problems in place.
> 
> There are long threads on this list about problems with things like
> htmlText, or cross-platform font issues that are obviously affecting
> everyone, and I keep expecting someone at RunRev to step in and say
> "hey, we hear you on the htmlText issue, we'll deal with it, thanks",
> or "hey, we hear you on the cross-platform font issue, we're working on
> it".  Even "forget the cross-platform font issue, we don't think it's
> important enough to fix" would be useful feedback.  But the current
> lack of direct feedback from RunRev is, to say the least,
> disheartening.

We do hear you on all of these issues.  We just have fairly limited
bandwidth so unfortunately don't always post a reply.

With respect to the htmlText issue, we do test this component, but of course
things can slip through and we don't have the resources to find every single
case where there is a problem.  We're constantly working on improving our
procedures, and for a serious issue that you can't track down - i.e. are
stuck on coming up with a recipe for, we would of course look at stepping in
to help.  But it seems that this probably is a relatively straightforward
issue that happens from time to time, and if we can have a recipe we will
simply get it fixed.

The cross platform font issues are really a set of different issues that are
not entirely related.  There are a few inconsistencies certainly that we can
and will improve on easily.  However a lot of the problems come down to
issues with the slightly different font architectures on each platform.
Some are also related to printing and the cross platform differences there.
Just about all can be worked around at the moment, but certainly we do have
plans to improve these areas substantially over time.

Kind regards,

Kevin

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at runrev.com ~ http://www.runrev.com/
Runtime Revolution - User-Centric Development Tools