Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:31:22 +0200 (CEST) From: hm@kts.org (Hellmuth Michaelis) To: js@mgm-net.de Cc: hm@kts.org, logix@foobar.franken.de, freebsd-isdn@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: i'll unsubscribe from isdn-freebsd Message-ID: <m0zM6o6-00000hC@bert.kts.org> In-Reply-To: <199809231248.OAA12281@orion.mgm-net.de> from Jochen Scharrlach at "Sep 23, 98 02:48:35 pm"
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All the following is not a flame and it is not meant to be taken personally. A noticable amount of letters has a content similar to the one i'm replying to here and just because of this i'm answering this one. > > The reasons are twofolded - one thing is that most of the private and > > commercial users of i4b seem to have a strong consume-only mentality, > > Ok, this is what I would have to do to debug i4b: > * learning the ISDN standard > * learning how i4b is structured (ok, that is somehow documented) > > That's about 20h work until I can start doing anything. Why do you think you can avoid something and instead depend on me doing this work for you ? There are two ways available to get something done, one way is to do sit down and do something yourself and the other is to pay someone to do something which one self does not want to do or is not able to do. > because I had an idea where to look at. What I whished from you would > have been a hint in which part of i4b my problem is caused and how it > may be solved. All I got from you is a nice comment like "I don't have > your problem, so I don't care". I once (and the only time i remeber) wrote you (on the list): > I'm not sure what they mean, but they don't look good. It seems to me > that i4b gets trouble if the machine runs for several days. Mine run for several weeks without trouble .... until they are upgraded. Just for the record - a quoute from the i4b README: Some bugs seem to occur only in certain environments and are not reproducable here without access to the equipment you are connected to or other equipment like PBX simulators: in this case you are the only person being able to trace down the bug and fix it. > I promise to upgrade to 0.62 soon :) That would be a good idea! hellmuth That is quite different to "I don't have your problem, so I don't care", isn't it ? And i would write it again; its as valid today as it was valid at the time i wrote it. > Sorry, but that's not very satisfying for me. I can imagine that. But read it again: Some bugs seem to occur only in certain environments and are not reproducable here without access to the equipment you are connected to or other equipment like PBX simulators: in this case you are the only person being able to trace down the bug and fix it. I cannot reproduce certain failure scenes here. I simply cannot afford to have all the resources available here to reproduce all sorts of failures. I simply have sometimes no idea where to search or where to look. And some- times i'm simply not in a condition or i don't have the time to handhold people to fix problems or get their installation up and running. > I have a bit experience with the way bugs are handled by the > Emacs-, gcc- and Samba-developers and all of them are usually > interested in fixing bugs. You are implying that i'm not interested in fixing bugs. How do you come to that (wrong) conclusion ? I do my very best to make i4b as good as possible, but i simply have no idea why it fails sometimes. I would really like to be able to debug certain failure scenes, but it always reduces to money why i'm not able to do exactly that: travel to customers site and fix it in the field or buy the equipment needed to simulate the bug here or invest a huge amount of time to write and debug code to implement this or that nice to have feature like being able to recover from pulling the S0 plug in an orderly manner. (I've got one or two offers to use this type of equipment remotely over the internet. Thanks a lot, but i'm simply not able to use it because my internet connection is charged by volume and i have to care for nearly every single byte i use it for.) (Note: i4b is _quite_ different in nature from emacs, gcc or samba: to debug them you usually don't need to pay communication charges, ITU/ETSI documentation, buy hardware and analyzers or simulators.) > My question to you: do you want to write an ISDN-package that fits for > *your* needs, or do you want to build a general-purpose package? If > you don't care for my problems, I would have to do everything on my > own and that would be probably way to time consuming for me. It would be nice and i would appreciate it highly if i would be able to write a general purpose ISDN package. I would be able to work all day long on just isdn4bsd! It would take many machines and many cards and many different configurations and many different OS releases. I would have to buy all those docs i just know from saying and i would have to buy all those shiny new cards and sign many NDA's. I would test my implementation against references and buy test suites and simulators and eventually it would run under all imaginable situations and i'd get a telco approval for i4b. And i would charge everyone who needs an i4b copy, hmmm, lets say 100$ plus shipping and handling, just binaries. Telephone support for the first 30 days add up another 25 or 50$ and after that i'm shure everyone here signs a maintenance agreement for ongoing support and quarteryearly updates and enhancements. Oh, you want to get something for free - Ok. What i'm then able to do is a package which fits my needs. And as much help and contribution and donation i get from the outside exactly proportional that much general purpose it will be. Oh, you want me to care for your problems, do you then also want to care for my problems ? And what do you think, shall i care only for your problems or also for everyone else's problems with i4b ? Where do you think shall i take the time from ? Where shall i take the money from when fixing a bug or implementing a feature or a driver means being connected to some remote site or buying docs or buying hardware ? I'm sorry, but you get exactly what you pay for. And in the case of isdn4bsd you get a whole more than what you did actually payed for. And belive me, i care. Usually i care as much as the remote side is willing to invest time (for learning, understanding the code, reading the docs and the README, to produce proper and complete bugreports, to solve the problem by themselves), persistence and other resources. hellmuth -- Hellmuth Michaelis hm@kts.org Hamburg, Europe We all live in a yellow subroutine, yellow subroutine, yellow subroutine ... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isdn" in the body of the message
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