Re: AbiWord is too buggy for Bonita

Hi Again,

Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> please file any specific bugs in the
> bugzilla with instructions how to reproduce the behaviour.

and Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> Bug reports and patches welcome.

Um, have either of you ever actually TRIED the current release of
AbiWord on Windows?

I tried to be friendly and helpful, but I guess I wasn't being clear.
I'm glad to supply both carefully-researched, reproducible bug reports
and expertly written patches, but before I do, I have to have the
expectation that taking the trouble to do so will actually do anybody
any good.

Maybe there haven't been reports filed of SOME of the bugs Bonita
experienced, but I find it hard to believe that AbiWord could have been
as unstable as she found it without it being well-known that there are
some serious problems, problems that are either already in the database
or at least readily apparent to any of your developers.

What I was asking was not that you fix any of Bonita's particular
problems, but that you place a greater emphasis on reliability in
general. I'm NOT willing to supply either bug fixes or bug reports if I
have the sense that others are going to beat me in the race, creating
more bugs than I can fix.

It had slipped my mind, in my first mail, that the reason Bonita finally
gave up on AbiWord and switched to OpenOffice was that AbiWord crashed
and she lost a couple hours of work.

The reason that I gave up on OpenOffice and switched to Word is that
because OpenOffice does not perform safe saves, but instead overwrites
the previous draft of a document when saving a new one, when my PC hung
during a save I lost an entire day's work on a consulting contract
proposal - a document which had to be submitted by a looming deadline.
I find it hard to understand why safe save wasn't implemented in
OpenOffice from the very beginning.

And just yesterday, I lost all of my saved email when Mozilla failed to
check to see if there was any filesystem space left. It reinitialized
all my mail and newsgroup settings and now can't find any of my saved mail.

I started to file a bug report, only to find that this problem has been
well-known for years. I can understand why there might not be a fix -
it is apparently an intractible problem. What I CAN'T understand is why
Mozilla will continue to operate even when its developers know, and HAVE
KNOWN FOR YEARS, that doing so will destroy user data.

Possibly there is some way to recover my mail, but that's not my point.

My point is that for Open Source or Free Software to have any success at
penetrating markets where people use it for their daily productivity,
and depend on its reliability for their livelihood, then a greater
emphasis than I have seen so far from all but a few open source projects
has to be placed on reliability, and above all, the preservation of user
data.

Now, as I said before, I'm happy to help. I WANT AbiWord to succeed, I
really do, or I never would have asked Bonita to try it out. But I am
very busy with my work and my music studies. I don't have much time to
waste. If I am going to devote substantial amounts of my valuable time
and effort to improving the reliability of AbiWord, I have to have some
expectation that the product that results from all my work will be more
reliable than it was when I started.

I don't have that expectation yet. I don't see how anyone could, after
finding a program that's past its 2.0 release to be so buggy as to be
completely unusable. Possibly Bonita found bugs you don't know about
yet, but she found so many bugs, and so frequently, that I find it hard
to believe you don't already know about a lot of them. I don't know how
you could, in good conscience, release such a program to the end user.

I invite you to help me to feel otherwise. Hubert can tell you: I've
been programming for a long time. I've written C++ for ten years. I
wrote my first Mac application in 1987, and my first Unix one in 1985.
I'm no slouch. I just don't like to see my efforts go to waste.

Please take my constructive criticism in the spirit in which it is
intended. As I said, I am genuinely trying to help, not to insult or
offend.

Ever Faithful,

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

    Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
Received on Thu Mar 17 20:21:14 2005