Comment by hellofunk
7 years ago
It still boggles me that Jira tickets with small bug fixes to real problems confirmed by other members of Cognitect have never been merged, due to Rich’s time. Simple fixes to core functions that make the language more stable for edge cases without breaking design or backwards compatibility. Fixes that the Jira threads reveal others at Cognitect support patching and for which patches have already been written. Tiny fixes with little code involved. I understand being conservative on new features but isn’t it in everyone’s interest, including Rich and Cognitect’s, to fix actual bugs?
The answer tends to be that if the bug doesn’t affect Rich personally then it does not get attention. That doesn’t seem healthy for the language.
Is this true? I've never personally been affected by a bug, and every new versions has a list of bugfixes that were merged in.
I think most of those fixes you mention are actually semantic altering and thus possibly backwards incompatible.
We actually never got our bugs solved. My particular favorite was CLJ-1741, which made reloading code with Cursive basically not work in our code base. Opened in 2015, effectively abandoned to its fate in 2016.
Well, I mean, it's still open. I'm sure if it got more votes on it, it would be better prioritized. That said, I guess this is a good example of a possibly starving issue where the core team can't scale to address the most minor issues.