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Re: Re: New version, new bugs

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg42672] Re: [mg42631] Re: New version, new bugs
  • From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
  • Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 06:20:50 -0400 (EDT)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

On Friday, July 18, 2003, at 11:25 AM, Bill Rowe wrote:

> On 7/17/03 at 3:45 AM, ErsekTR at navair.navy.mil (Ersek, Ted R) wrote:
>
>> In response to some reported bugs Andrzej Kozlowski wrote:
>> I agree that the other bugs you mention are awful and ought to have 
>> been
>> fixed long ago. Some of them at least seem pretty trivial to fix and 
>> it
>> seems that the only reason why they haven't been fixed is that they 
>> were
>> never recorded on a "to be done" list. I feel that something is 
>> seriously
>> amiss when a reported bug that does not require a major re-write of 
>> the
>> kernel is not fixed: at least the person who reported it ought to be 
>> given
>> an explanation why it has not been done. It looks to me that Wolfram's
>> entire bug-reporting system needs a serious reconsideration.
>
> While I can understand your fustration, you have assumed quite a bit 
> in your remarks that may not be true. A bug that might look trivial to 
> you to fix may in fact be far from trivial. And even if a very 
> specific bug is trivial to fix, fixing it might introduce other 
> problems with code that depends on the code being altered. I suspect 
> for any code change to the kernel Wolfram has to go through a fairly 
> extensive suite of testing to ensure they have not introduced new 
> problems. I suspect this makes even the most trivial bugs not as 
> trivial as you might think.

While is true that usually we do not know if a bug can be "fixed 
easily"   you are wrong to assume that we can never know it or that we 
can't know it in some of the cases discussed in this thread. There are 
indeed ways of "knowing" such things, the most obvious of which is 
being told so directly by the person at WRI who wrote the code 
containing the bug. But even in the absence of such direct knowledge we 
can sometimes understand the way a bug rises ourselves. In fact two of 
the bugs that Maxim Rytin pointed out are simple syntax errors in 
Mathematica code (not internal C-code)  , which can be clearly seen by 
using Trace. It certainly should not take several years to fix this 
sort of thing.


Andrzej Kozlowski
Yokohama, Japan
http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~akoz/
http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/


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