On Sep 8, 2007, at 2:23 AM, Rikard Bosnjakovic wrote:
On 01/09/2007, René Dudfield <renesd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: [...]They called people silly/stupid who don't have unit tests.Oh, great... Atleast that confirms some of the bad thoughts I had about those guys. Nowadays they're almost as horrible as the perl-community guys, if not worse. Some years ago I sent a bug-report for one of the modules (I don't remember which, i think it was the ftp-module). The module caused core dumps on my system, and the dev-team were really interested in the bug so I sent it. Unfortunately, it seemed I had Python v2.1a4 (or similiar), which was a one month old release or such, and I had to withstand comments like (free from memory) "well brainiac, you should be up-to-date with the version before bug-reporting ;-)". And this was from both Guido himself and some of the others in the team, in the sourceforge-forums. I would have atleast expected a bit more professional correspondence but, alas, no.
I don't find hearsay commentary about people you don't really know very helpful. Yes, there is sometimes an "ivory tower" effect where the core developers are overly skeptical, but this is simply a defense against the naturally tendency of 90% of everything to be total crap.
And I have to agree with them that bug reports against alpha releases that aren't current aren't typically very helpful. These people have a very finite amount of time to work on these projects and they are only asking that you do some due diligence before they divert their time to the issue you have raised. Maybe there was a lack of tact (but again this is hearsay), my suggestion is to not be so sensitive, people often are not as polite as we want them to be. I doubt their intention was to offend you, just nudge you.
Remember too that these are individuals speaking, and even Guido's opinion is not necessarily representative of the community at large. So making generalizations about the community based on a one-time event is dubious.
As for the original point about unit tests (which is again hearsay), I'd wager there's some missing context there. I agree 100% that you are foolish to develop "serious" code that lacks tests. As for games or fun projects, I think it is far less critical. Regardless, you're the boss and you can do whatever you want.
-Casey