On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
This advice is all well and good, unless someone in particular actually is misguided. Glad to see people jumping on the chance to posture themselves as superior communicators - that's also really productive!
- Trevor
This is quickly getting OT. This is a productive list guys, lets keep it that way :)
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/8/10 3:40 PM, Andrew Garrett wrote:
I think the point is that it makes bug reports that much easier to understand when they're reported by somebody who isn't in debug mode. This has to be traded off against the performance advantages of removing blank lines. Is there any data on how significant the performance improvements are?
+1. I'd really like to see data on this as well. Linebreaks just seem inherently useful, and I think we need to make a stronger case for performance if we're going to remove them.
You expect users to have the expertise to report a bug which includes a line number where the bug occurred, yet you don't expect they will be able to add debug=true to the URL when asked to do so? Also, the critical part of reporting a bug is rarely the only information needed to fix a problem.
I don't think it's about expertise at all.
For what it's worth, we also get a good number of drive-by bug reports, so *expecting* followup to a bug can leave you with nothing.
Is there any data on how significant the number of or quality of bug reports will be impaired by this?
No, and given the subjective nature of quality, I don't think you could easily measure it.
We would be the only web site I know of, certainly the only web site of similar size to choose to try and retain line-numbers in production output. I suspect that they are still functioning just fine.
There's lots of other differences between us and other sites of our size, so we shouldn't always look to our neighbors for advice :)
-Chad