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If I may (this is a Meditation after all), your post reminds me of why I love open source. Something breaks from one version to the next in a mature piece of software, people notice and can find out why (it's not always fun, but you can). You, pemungkah, can come here and write an insightful (inciteful? :P) post and we can all learn something, both tangible and intangible. To top it off, I'm 99.9% sure something will be done as a direct result to make the lives better of countless programmers who depend on said module.

Contrast with commercial software, something I interface with regularly on a daily basis at $work. One such piece of..software released a new minor version without, apparently, any sort of regression testing whatsoever (imagine that, software shipping with tests! Hah!). Now about half of my scripts fail, and with errors so cryptic and arbitrary you'd swear it was a joke. I would kill for something like

Error GETing http://cantreachthis.com: Page not found

My, how direct and straightforward - even though it doesn't take into consideration all the context you've provided, it still gives enough information to figure out what went wrong. And if not all future Google searches will surely lead people to your post, since you did the honors of figuring out exactly what happened.

Now imagine trying to load a .csv file and getting an error saying "Invalid SQL syntax." or converting between data formats and getting an error message related to a missing "locator" and you get the picture. You can try in despair to find out the answer, but what mostly winds up happening is a bunch of hackish workarounds with lots of colorful commentary in the source.

Anyways, cheers to you pemungkah and all the monks who remind me why programming is fun and why I gravitated to it.


In reply to Re: On moving forward and breaking compatibility by blakew
in thread On moving forward and breaking compatibility by pemungkah

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