Subject: Re: ACL, CLISP and pathnames From: Erik Naggum <cl@naggum.no> Date: 1998/05/15 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3104214648946194@naggum.no> * Barry Margolin | May I make a comment as a disinterested, (hopefully) unbiased, third party? sure. sorry for the response time, though, a new project is coming up. | Sam's post that mentioned :KEY also said that he was aware of the fix. uhm, he was aware of the patch to ACL 4.3 that I had sent him, but it did not look to me like he believed that it had been fixed _officially_ in or for a later release, a fact of which I have informed him several times, despite which he keeps carping on this problem. granted, I can be nasty about bugs in software, too, but at least I _stop_ when they get fixed. | He was simply pointing out one place where he knew of a feature that the | base ACL was missing but CLISP wasn't. what's a "base ACL"? see, this is where the ambiguitiy comes in. Sam thought he was unambiguous in talking about the ACL 4.3 for Linux offering, but the statement was general and referred to the whole product without qualification. however, whether a product for which there has been published a patch to a reported problem can be said to exist without the patch is a question of some relevance, but my take on it is that if a patch has been issued _and_ you have a problem that the patch fixes, then you have only one thing to do: install the patch. | Sam's original post asked a very simple question in a very civil manner; | his later post simply made an observation, not a complaint. Your | responses had a very confrontational tone. I can't see how anything in | Sam's posts in this thread could have provoked your attitude. I think I already explained this adequately, but to recap: Sam seems very lenient with the bugs and non-conformance issues in CLISP, to the point where he even suggests that _I_ join the team and help fix things, while he's incredibly upset with this REDUCE/:KEY problem and _any_ problem he finds in Allegro CL, always taking CLISP's side, as it were, deservedly or not. e.g., he only very reluctantly accepted the patch I offered him (_twice_, before he accepted it), and then had the gall to complain that it was slow, but without any sign of effort on his part to fix his own problems. again, I can be harsh on bugs in Allegro CL myself, but towards Franz Inc, not the newsgroups, and I usually make a big effort to either debug, help solve, or circumvent the problem through advice to the offending functions. and I don't think civil manners is a virtue when what you're doing is destructive. it reminds of the _least_ admirable side of politicians who are trying to get people to vote for them based on charisme, not on what they do or their real intentions. | Is there some other context that you're referring to when you say he | provoked you? well, yes, the whole history of the REDUCE/:KEY bug and Sam's history of being decidedly lop-sided in favor of CLISP and against Allegro CL, the total lack of predictability as to when he'll quit repeating complaints about bugs that have been fixed, and #:Erik -- Support organized crime: use Microsoft products!