[Mono-list] Can't build releases 1.1.5-1.1.7

[Kirill]

Todd Berman wrote:

>On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 10:17 +0300, Kirill wrote:
>  
>
>>Todd Berman wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 09:37 +0300, Kirill wrote:
>>>
>>>I have no desire to address your ranting about a website that may or may
>>>not be the most clear, but absolutely is not as difficult as you say to
>>>navigate (As a point of reference, one of our developers at work who has
>>>never used linux was able to build mono 1.1.6 without any help from
>>>anyone, and asked a grand total of 2 questions in order to get MD 0.6
>>>running)
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes, you're right. The whole reason must be that I'm just too stupid to
>>do it the right way.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>You said it, not me.
>  
>
Don't be such a child :) I didn't mean to insult you with my negative
feedback. If I did, please accept my honest apologies.

>>>I didn't intend to file any bug reports. I'm not involved with this
>>>project and I don't have any reason to spend my time trying to help it.
>>>I would have, if I saw that a couple of bug reports might make it
>>>usable, but, judging by the amount of bugs that showed up after 5
>>>minutes of playing around, it's not the case.
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>
>Well, myself and many others use it for 8 hours a day at work, so it
>seems to work well enough for us. The fact that you don't have time to
>file a couple of simple bugs to help yourself and others but you do have
>time to engage in multi-day flaming on a public mailing list for no
>reason basically shows where your true intentions are.
>  
>
Hey, I just wanted to try Mono, I swear! I'm not a Microsoft hidden
agent, sent to disrupt the open-source community from inside. In case
that's what you were thinking. Chatting in forums is fun (and it also
gives me good practice in English). Hunting for bugs is no fun. In order
to write a good bug report, one needs at least to try to find a
consistent way to reproduce it. Since I'm neither interested, nor
obliged to do it, I don't. And when you throw at me your holy disgust
about my heretical laziness which prohibits me from filing *a simple bug
report*, it doesn't raise my motivation, either. Can you see my point?

>It is one thing to be unhappy about the state of various things, but it
>is another to flame people without any cause. 
>
Sorry again, but I was simply defending my opinions. People asked, why I
think the way I do, and I explained it. But I did have the cause: to
bring attention to the described documentation and installation issues.
If they get corrected, it will benefit me the next time I'll test a new
version and it will also benefit every other inexperienced member of the
community. It's with this thought that I wrote to the list after finally
getting MD working. I didn't come swearing and screaming how your
software is full of bugs. I know that software in different phases of
development has different (sometimes high) amount of glitches and am
prepared to handle it. What I was not prepared to is misleading
documentation. Because when software doesn't work, you see it directly.
But when the documentation is so flawed, you tell yourself all the time:
well, I haven't tried to build it in this way... maybe I'm using an
incorrect gecko-sharp version, let's try another... hmm, there are daily
builds and snapshots on the site, and there also are unstable releases
and SVN, what should I choose? what if I use a different prefix?.. hmm,
monodoc [I think] complains that it can't find mcs in the parent
directory... let's checkout the mcs and try it again... damn, it doesn't
compile, let's checkout the latest tagged version... wait, I think it's
included in the distribution... Hours pass, and you still haven't even
seen the program in action, and it's too embarrassing to just raise your
hands at this point.

>The mono website is a
>wiki. If you are such a grand master of making clear instructions on how
>to do everything, why not help out?
>
It's my own responsibility to decide, how much and in which way to
contribute (if at all). I was expressing my opinions with background
thought that you are interested in constructive feedback. And I do
consider my feedback constructive.
Besides, I have very little idea about the project's workflow and no
time or wish to investigate it in details. So my documentation efforts
woudn't do any good. They might be consistent with the nearest release,
but break with the next one. Or are you asking me to become your
constant technical writer?

>And if you have the ability to find
>bugs in software so well that makes it so you can declare MD as
>'unusable' in 5 minutes (which i doubt, considering 5 minutes isnt even
>enough for the completion databases to build up) file a couple of them.
>  
>
Now that's a rant. If the program crashes or throws weird errors at you,
you don't have to be Alan Cox to see that it doesn't work. But you're
right in something: the program is unusable for me and only for me. If
it works for you or if you're enthusiastical enough to deal with its
rough edges - fine.

>My guess is that you build MD from SVN (which is fine)
>
As I said, I had been building the 0.6 tarball release. But I have also
built the SVN trunk version later, when someone here said that it works
fine for him. Well, for me it wasn't better than 0.6.

>and it had bugs
>(which it does), but guess what. YOU BUILT FROM SVN. ITS UNDER
>DEVELOPMENT. What exactly did you expect? A product like VS.NET for
>free? MonoDevelop is a community run project with no corporate support
>and just a couple developers. If you are unwilling to even help out as
>far as filing a bug or 3, then don't bother crying in public when it
>doesn't fit your needs.
>  
>
You're implying that I was complaining about code quality - again. Which
I wasn't. In fact, I mentioned MD's bugs only on a side note - as a sad
final of the multi-hour struggle. All the further discussion on this
topic was brought by the indignant adepts.