Re: [lmi] xsl-fo changes: testing results

[Greg Chicares]

On 2007-06-14 22:13Z, Evgeniy Tarassov wrote:
> On 6/14/07, Murphy, Kimberly <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> 1) The scale unit (i.e., Values are shown in ...) on the illustration
>> has parenthesis around the text. While consistent on all xsl files,
>> our preference is to not have the parenthesis. Please remove.
> 
> The following patch remove the parentheses.
> http://lmi.tt-solutions.com/codestriker/codestriker.pl?topic=7605483&action=view
> 
> 
> A question -- may I do slight reformatting in the patches?
> 
> On one hand the patch is trivial, but it is not minimal. A patch that
> repairs a tiny defect -- should it be minimal to reduce the (tiny)
> risk of introduction of another defect, or is a patch like this one
> could be considered clear enough?

I've been distracted by other things and neglected to answer.

What really matters is quality, and we all have to make our own
engineering decisions. AIUI, you're testing each change as you
go, so I'd suggest committing all your changes to HEAD now so
that Kim can test them when she returns tomorrow.

20070614 was not a typical day, nor was the 20070614T1810Z cvs
change typical. Very close to the end of a release-testing cycle,
we made a profound change in the way we create the files that are
being tested. And I'd put in an eighteen-hour day the day before,
working with you on the foundations for that change, so I was
exhausted. Due to that combination of factors, I was rather more
cautious and risk averse than usual, at least wrt that profound
change.

However, wrt a different change, I made an unacceptable mistake:

  http://cvs.sv.gnu.org/viewvc/lmi/lmi/system_command_wx.cpp?r1=1.3&r2=1.4

I'm grateful to you for pointing it out, but I shouldn't have
made the mistake in the first place, so I've been studying it
carefully and reading what better programmers have to say; let
me share a couple of quotes.

"Notes on the Errors of TeX"
https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb10-4/tb26knut.pdf

| I recommend that everybody keep an error log such as the one I
| kept for TEX. The amount of extra time required is negligible
| (less than l%), and the resulting records help us to understand
| ourselves and our fallible natures.

http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Knuth/index.shtml

| When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s]
| one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a
| computer programming contest with people on research projects
| in the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.
|
| [John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that
| Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the
| program running and he also won the fastest execution of the
| algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch
| called the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the [expletive]
| out of everyone.
|
| And they asked him, "How could you possibly do this?" And he
| answered, "When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got
| five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the
| program going, it just had to be written right. So people just
| learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have
| to sidle up to it. That's how I learned to program."