[Ifeffit] Demeter-devel MacPorts Athena issues & work-around

[Scott Calvin]

Hi all,

This is probably as good a time as any to mention a miscommunication I've seen come up a couple of times on the list that may have caused unnecessary friction. It's a good time because it =isn't= what transpired in the current thread (which ended happily for all involved), so it hopefully won't get bogged down in particulars.

Sometimes I've seen someone post to the list that they've been having an intermittent, difficult to diagnose, or otherwise mysterious problem, asking if anyone else had seen something similar. That makes for a lousy bug report, but is, in my opinion, a reasonable and rational use of a list like this. 

As a hypothetical, something like "is the latest distributed version of Hephaestus working for other people using MacPorts?" is a useful diagnostic question, and a terrible bug report. It does not require a response of any kind from Bruce, Matt, etc., and they should not feel compelled to give one. "Works for me" or "No, Hephaestus crashes" would be useful responses from other members of the community. 

To put it another way, I think this list straddles the boundary between being part of the reporting system for software and a community board. It's important to recognize, I think, when each function is being utilized.

That's not to say that there aren't lousy bug reports that get posted here--there are. When someone says "Athena crashes every time I open it--please fix this bug," they are not being useful to anyone. But I am saying that not every report of problems is actually a bug report.

That said, I think this is a good list. Everyone who contributes to it is a volunteer, and there are interesting and helpful discussions that take place at a wide range of levels.

--Scott Calvin
Sarah Lawrence College

P.S. If we're looking for ways to improve the list in the future, I'd suggest considering the possibility of a more modern forum format. I am sure there are open-source platforms for such a thing. It would be wonderful to have an upvote type feature (Facebook's "like" is the most familiar example), more user-friendly threading, and the ability to delete and edit posts.