Re: [MiNT] Thing and MiNT

["Roger Burrows" <rfburrows@ymail.com>]

On 20 Dec 2009 at 21:35, Jo Even Skarstein wrote:
>
> Peter Slegg skreiv:
> 
> > What you are saying is that an application that has worked
> > fine for years with TOS and various versions of Mint is
> > broken because some versions of XaAES or Mint break it.
> 
> No. I'm saying that Thing 1.27 most likely has been broken all the time. 
> A change (don't know which) in XaAES has highlighted a bug in Thing. The 
> fact that is has been working previously doesn't mean that it has been 
> working correctly.
> 

To add to this:
It would be difficult (and almost certainly a waste of resources) to determine 
whether Thing 1.27 is in fact broken.  But I think that most programmers have 
experienced the situation where a working program does not work with a new 
version of the operating system (or new hardware, or new something else) and 
have discovered that there was in fact a bug in the program which didn't show 
up before.  It would be unreasonable in this situation to expect that the 
operating system maintainers would work around a bug in another program ... in 
many cases, it might in fact be impossible to do so.

So when a new release of an operating system comes out, and a particular 
program no longer works properly (especially if it is only that program), it is 
quite likely due to a program bug.  Ideally, you would contact the author, who 
would investigate, discover whether it's a program or operating system bug, and 
either fix it or inform the operating system maintainers who would then fix 
their problem.  Unfortunately I don't think this is going to happen with Thing. 
So you are faced with a (hard) choice:
 . live with the bug (work around it)
 . don't use the new release of the operating system
 . stop using the program and find a replacement

This is one argument for open-source software - or for at least the publishing 
of source code for no-longer-maintained programs (although sometimes that 
source code might be unmaintainable anyway, based on my experience...).

Regards,
Roger Burrows