'Community Beta' has lost its way [part 1]

[Bernard Devlin]

Hi Ken,

(I'm going to address this to you, but obviously most of this is just  
aimed at a public debate).

> Mark Waddingham has personally responded to virtually all the  
> questions and
> bug-related posts on the Improve list

I put it to you that the love-fest to be found in the improve list  
might not be an experience shared by those who are not members of  
that group.    Kudos to Mark for being so responsive to you guys.

> But to say that
> the overall effort of the Community Beta has 'lost its way' primarily
> because a specific bug that most likely affects a very small  
> percentage
> of the Rev community is overstating things IMHO.

The point isn't that bug 3196 has not been fixed.  It's about a  
situation where a long-standing, reported, well-proven bug  was being  
allowed to remain, 6 months into a Beta test program that was  
specifically supposed to remove these long-standing bugs.  Trying to  
get the attention of the bug-squashing process met with a resounding  
silence -- exactly the situation that Bill Marriott was complaining  
about so loudly last October.

In the past few weeks I've written to the list about this bug,  
written to the relevant forum, written to the Bug-Meister himself,  
and updated the bug report in Bugzilla.  Until I 'overstated it', I  
got zero response.  That's a rather different experience to your  
experience.

It's great that Bill is collecting information about satisfaction  
levels from participants of the Community Beta.  However, if someone  
has already lost interest in the Beta and in Rev, are they really  
going to bother filling in Bill's survey?  In fact, I let that survey  
sit in my inbox for days before I bothered to complete it, because to  
me the whole thing has seemed like a futile, empty, time-wasting  
exercise.  And I'm one of the people who in the past has loudly  
challenged those who proclaimed that Rev was buggy but who were not  
going to take an active part in trying to make it better.

Tonight I had a look at who was the original poster of bug 3196, to  
see why they have been so quiet in all this.  In October 2006, a  
whole year after logging this bug, he wrote to the list to say he was  
going to stop using Rev because he was so dissatisfied.  And there  
have been no posts from him since, so I guess that means he followed  
through with that decision.  Don't you think that there might be  
quite a few others who would give up on Rev before they got so far as  
to 'overstate' things and get some attention?  Most dissatisfied  
customers will walk away rather than make a fuss

As to the "small percentage of the Rev community" affected by this  
bug: it affects any OS X user who needs to programmatically interact  
with the many Unix userland tools and applications found on their  
OS.   Searching my Rev mail list archive for the last 4 years brings  
up 99 posts related to "open process" on OS X, and the vast majority  
of these posts are from luminaries of this list.   Furthermore, I put  
it to you that there would have been even more posts concerning this,  
if people realised what it meant to have this working i.e. once they  
saw what people were doing with this technique.  (When I first  
brought up this long-standing bug on the list a few weeks ago, one of  
the best x-talkers wrote to me privately to ask for more information  
about what is possible using "write to process".  That makes me think  
it probable that there has not been much interest in this particular  
bug because most of the Mac Rev users have a history from Classic  
where "write to process" was quite alien.)  There might also have  
been more interest in this issue if the Dictionary didn't explicitly  
tell us that we shouldn't use "write to process" on OS X, and that we  
should use shell() instead.  In simple scenarios, shell() will work,  
but it is by no means an adequate substitute beyond the most simple  
cases. And unlike many other bugs, there is no workaround for this.   
It _is_ a blocker (and I'm _not_ the one who categorized it as such  
in Bugzilla - it's had that status for at least 18 months).

[part 2 to follow]