Re: [Pnet-developers] [Bug #2806] CSCC virtual memory exhausted

[Fergus Henderson]

On 19-Mar-2003, Rhys Weatherley <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 March 2003 05:25 pm, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> 
> > No, because at that point you can with good conscience file their report
> > as an enhancement request, not a bug report.
> 
> And at what point can I mark it as "closed" and hence no longer on the list
> of issues to be addressed?

Wishlist items can be left open indefinitely.  It doesn't mean that anyone
has to address them.  It doesn't even mean that anyone has to look at
those items ever again.  Each wishlist item just means that someone has
expressed a wish for a particular enhancement.

> This is fundamentally an issue about when a bug/feature/whatever can finally 
> be considered dealt with and no further discussion will be entered into.

Suppose someone came up with a clean patch which addressed this issue.
Would you accept such a patch?  (I think you should.)

If so, then the issue should be left open.

If not, why not?

> So, let me turn this around for a second.  Let's say a bug/request was logged 
> against Mercury, that no matter what you did it was impossible to satisfy 
> everyone with an interest in the issue.  What do you do?

If a request was logged against Mercury, asking for better error messages,
I would never consider this request impossible to satisfy.  If the current
design of the Mercury implementation was such that it too difficult
to provide better error messages, then I would file this item in the
"wish list", and would then forget about it.  Note that the "wish list"
is NOT the same as the "task list".

Even if different users made diametrically opposed requests, I would
generally not consider this impossible to satisfy -- usually both groups
can be satisfied by providing compiler options (or equivalent) to select
different behaviour.

If some request was made such that it was truly impossible to satisfy
everyone with an interest in the issue, then I would close the issue,
giving an explanation of why it was impossible to satisfy the request
without sacrificing another functional requirement which was considered
more important.  But that does not appear to be the case in the instance
under discussion.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <address@hidden>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.