From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 6517 invoked by alias); 28 May 2005 06:40:36 -0000 Mailing-List: contact cygwin-talk-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-talk-owner@cygwin.com Reply-To: Talk Amongst Yourselves Received: (qmail 6506 invoked by uid 22791); 28 May 2005 06:40:32 -0000 Received: from c-66-30-17-189.hsd1.ma.comcast.net (HELO cgf.cx) (66.30.17.189) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.30-dev) with ESMTP; Sat, 28 May 2005 06:40:32 +0000 Received: by cgf.cx (Postfix, from userid 201) id 9A1EC13CA7E; Sat, 28 May 2005 02:40:31 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 29 May 2005 16:07:00 -0000 From: Christopher Faylor To: cygwin-talk@cygwin.com Subject: Re: Serious performance problems (malloc related?) Message-ID: <20050528064031.GA12112@trixie.casa.cgf.cx> Reply-To: cygwin-talk@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin-talk@cygwin.com References: <4297A14B.9070409@plausible.org> <20050527234027.GA7522@trixie.casa.cgf.cx> <4297B572.9050200@plausible.org> <20050528005054.GB7522@trixie.casa.cgf.cx> <20050528042954.GA4196@venus> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050528042954.GA4196@venus> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.8i X-SW-Source: 2005-q2/txt/msg00280.txt.bz2 On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 09:29:54PM -0700, Edward Peschko wrote: >But Mr. Faylor, no offense, but you *are* snippy. You complain about >lack of clue in bug reports, lack of motivation for people to pick up >the code and play with it, yet you *constantly* throw cold water on >people's motivation to feel good about dealing with cygwin. > >Just some advice - take a step back and get a good meta-view at >yourself. Aren't you the guy who insisted that you had a right to communicate in private email about some kind of plan to merge MinGW and Cygwin and then subsequently complained, in multiple messages to the cygwin list, about the fact that I didn't want to talk to you privately? I am pretty sure that's you. I just like to set the stage when someone starts off on this type of email. For the record: I do not give any serious consideration to the two or three email voices here who think they speak from some sort of moral high ground and are compelled to tell me how to communicate. I do very much appreciate that you haven't lapsed into profanity or sarcasm, however. 99% of the time when people report a problem they are saying "I have a problem. I didn't go to too much effort to figure it out. I didn't do any research about how I should report it. I want you to help me now." My response to this kind of email is normally to point people to where they need to go to either fix the problem themselves or provide the information that we need to fix the problem. If people don't like the way I do this, here's something that should be obvious by now: I don't care. You can take my response or leave it. In this case, the OP provided a test case, which is rare (and appreciated). They didn't provide any other details other than that, although he did offer noise information about how he'd rather be using linux and how this was a serious problem. He also offered a completely uninformed guess. We normally ask for the guidelines from http://cygwin.com/problems.html, to be followed, however, I know that issues of performance are rarely cut and dry (although knowing the version of cygwin that was exhibiting problems would have been interesting) and so the real key here is to learn enough about the DLL to diagnose the problem. What you interpret as "snippiness" is just cut and dry advice: If you have a lot of people relying on a product and the product is misbehaving then it makes sense to either purchase support or learn enough about it so that you can support it. Relying on volunteer email to fix something which is impacting your whole organization is not a reliable way to get "serious problems" fixed. FWIW, the original message violated many of the tenants of Eric Raymond's "How to Ask Smart Questions" and I responded just like Eric Raymond predicted. >There are two ways of seeing it - everybody (or a huge subset of everybody) >is wrong and I'm squeaky clean, or yes I could improve my attitude in how >to deal with people. One thing you may notice in my email, is that I normally try to I try to tell people what they need to do to get results. I don't normally tell people that "everyone" thinks a certain way and I don't often make personal observations about people's character. I just offer (often terse) advice on what I think someone should do to solve a problem. As it turns out, for the most part, the way that I conduct myself provides me with the results that I want. The mailing list is fairly self policing these days. People who report "cygwin not work" bugs are directed towards the right way to report a problem and, often, their problems are fixed. People who want to contribute are pointed at cygwin-apps or cygwin-patches and often they end up contributing. Other people who want to change things but don't have a clear idea about what they want to do and only know that they are angry because I'm not nice to them, and won't give their half-formed thoughts the consideration they know they deserve, eventually go away. Which is exactly what I want to happen. This isn't a democracy. It's just a successful free software project. I (and Corinna) get to make the rules and I (we) get to comport myself how I (we) see fit. If you don't like that then you can take cygwin source code and make your own fork. (And, boy will I be fuming. That should offer some incentive at least) >I know this cultural issue has deterred me in the past; I keep hoping that >things'll change and I (and possibly many others) would change their mind >and start assisting cygwin. I have to confess that I'm *glad* that you are deterred. IIRC, in your communication to the cygwin list you rarely demonstrated a real grasp of the technical issues that you were trying to grapple with. So, I'm happy not to have to either witness or correct your misperceptions on a regular basis. Oh, and, there you go again. First it was "everyone" and then it was "possibly many others". I believe that this argument style is called "Appeal to Belief". You've posted relatively rarely to the cygwin list and have never, as I mentioned, and as I recall, demonstrated any particularly strong grasp of either the technical or community aspects of cygwin so I don't accept your premise that you speak for "everybody" or "possibly many others". Not that it would matter if I did. cgf