Re: A New Year's Resolution

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

wjhardaker@ucdavis.edu writes:

> Lars> Is there any point in responding to mail that more than 4 months old?

Hmph!  4 months is really nothing... :-) :-(

When I got `tar' maintenance (which I do not have anymore :-), `tar'
maintenance has already been put on hold for quite a long while.  I received
with it a huge backlog of accumulated problems, thousands of them.  I read in
all these reports a lot of frustration from users having had the impression
of writing into a black hole.  So, I made a point to reply to every message
while I was processing it, _however_ old it was.  Then, John Gilmore, the
original `tar' author, sent me his own collection of accumulated messages,
which was another big lot, and generally much older.  I merged everything.

I surely solved many thousands of messages, and just to keep the rope tight,
also received thousands of new messages.  Many single messages did require
a great deal of work.  `tar' is by far the most demanding package I ever
took care of, if you consider all the overhead it takes to do a proper job.
It was impossible for anyone-not-being-Lars to reply timely to everything.

Yet, when one installs a patch in 1998 for a problem first reported in 1989,
one feels strange while acknowledging the contribution to the submitter! :-)
Even then, my opinion is that we should never dismiss a user report, and
that even if some problems solve "themselves" over time, some just do not.

P.S. - My main hope is that `tar' is much more _maintainable_ now that it
originally was, the job should be more pleasurable to the new maintainer.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard