Software errors

[Mark Greenwood]

On Monday 24 May 2010 07:39:25 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> On Sunday 23 May 2010, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > On Sunday 23 May 2010 19:35:45 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> > > On Sunday 23 May 2010, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> 
> <nipping for brevity>
> 
<huge snip>

> Well, I guess that makes you one of the lucky ones... :-P
> Yet, in my experience, this is the exception rather than the norm, I 
> hope I've just been unlucky. Still, the vast amount of testers the 
> bigger OS project has outweighs all currently available automation 
> that I'm aware of. (And, coming from a university context, I'm most 
> certainly not aware of the higher-priced stuff.)

My job is doing that automation. We're owned (now) by a Taiwanese company, a country where manual labour is not an issue. They have a room full of people pushing buttons, whereas we have a lab with a few PCs and some automation software that I wrote. Where they spend 3 weeks working 14 hour days, I push a button and go home for the night, and achieve the same amount of test coverage by the next afternoon. If Kubuntu want to give me a job, I'm available ;-)

<snip>
> 
> > I'm not knocking open source development, don't get me wrong. This
> > all started because I told a guy that stuff like this just
> > happens in Linux, it's the nature of the beast.
> 
> Yes, and I'm saying it's the nature of software development in 
> general, and not specific to Linux, open source or any kind of 
> software in particular.

I understand where you're coming from but I still think that the collaborate open source development idea, though it has many advantages over closed source, also has many weaknesses - one of those being that some software may occasionally break when another is updated. Maybe this is because I accept so many updates on my Linux system, but then again maybe there are so many updates because things get broken a lot.
 
> I don't really care how this started - I'm enjoying the discussion, 
> even though I'm wondering whether this is the right place for it.

It's an interesting topic, but I think perhaps this is not the place for it any more. Feel free to continue it off-list.

Mark