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Re: What do we want in Carbon? (was Modern C++)

On Nov 7, 2003, at 14:00, Eric Schlegel wrote:

Actually, we do something very like that. When we introduce workarounds for a specific application, we (almost) always tie the workaround to a specific version or versions of the application - usually, the currently shipping version. So if FileBuddy version 22.4 happened to be incompatible with Mac OS 10.9, we would add a workaround that only applies to version 22.4; when you ship version 22.5, the workaround will cease to apply. We also always notify the developer of the problem that we find. That way, the developer has both the knowledge of what is needed to fix the bug, and an incentive to fix it in the next version of the application.

Unfortunately, this actually bit us relatively recently. We found that the in-development version of Palm Desktop exhibited a bug where the release version did not. It took us a while to figure out that it was something Apple had worked around[*].

Now, granted, I went through my archives and there was a discussion with an Apple engineer who said he'd put in a workaround for this bug, but it wasn't made clear to us that it would only apply to that specific version of our application, so we didn't realize we'd need to fix it before releasing another version.

In our case, we were just trying to quickly do a point release with a couple of high-profile bug fixes and we hadn't intended to take the time to fix this particular one, but our hands were forced. Not blaming Apple here, the code was always wrong and should have been fixed, but a slip in communications caused us some surprise and a schedule change.

[*] And rightly so: The offending code (which dates back to System 6 days) depended on a reverse-engineered system data structure. Even more unfortunately for us (read "me"), its use of this data was difficult to figure out and it took a while to come up with a clean alternative implementation for it.

--
Chris Page - Software Wrangler - palmOne, Inc.

SmartFriends(TM) U: Languages and Libraries, Sept. 26-28
Keynote: STL Creator, Alexander Stepanov
<http://SmartFriends.com/U>
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References: 
 >Re: What do we want in Carbon? (was Modern C++) (From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>)
 >Re: What do we want in Carbon? (was Modern C++) (From: Eric Schlegel <email@hidden>)



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