Further developments w.r.t. KDevelop documentation nightmare.

[Paul Derbyshire]

At 09:41 AM 2/10/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Man, what an attitude...

Yes, what an attitude.

My attitude is, if a job's worth doing it's worth doing right.

In the open source world I'm not expecting snazzy bells and whistles or
even perfect spit and polish. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect
(non-alpha) software to simply work, out of the box, when the prerequisites
are installed and functioning. And I don't think it's unreasonable to get
annoyed and express that annoyance if it doesn't.

Lastly, I think it's quite reasonable to criticize something or someone
that has an obvious problem -- e.g. if a packager doesn't bother to include
the documentation in a package he ships, leaving the user scratching his
head with a partially non-functional product, this is simply stupid, and I
can't think of any reasonable response other than to criticize that packager.

Don't forget it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

Besides, I'm not just criticizing for the sake of criticizing. I'm also
correcting the odd misleading remark (someone for example implied that
KDevelop could be expected to work perfectly out of the box, which in the
most recent non-alpha version, it clearly does not. And I'm trying to get
information to further the end of making it actually work. All of this, of
course, would be unnecessary if the thing worked to begin with -- it's a
sign of a problem with software if that software's mailing list is full of
questions about how to get it to do something as basic as display its own
documentation. And you can't claim I'm dense or something about how to set
it up, because multiple people have reported similar difficulties, and
there's even a bug on the kdevelop bug list about it, although the bug
ticket hasn't had any activity for over a year, itself a bad sign when it's
obviously not because the bug was resolved.

-- 
   .*.  "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-()  <  circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
   `*'  straight line."    -------------------------------------------------
        -- B. Mandelbrot  |http://surf.to/pgd.net derbyshire at globalserve.net
_____________________ ____|________                          Paul Derbyshire
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|