[python-win32] Bug reporting

[Bob Kline]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 12:31 AM, Mark Hammond
<mhammond at skippinet.com.au> wrote:

> I'm afraid Bob is going to get quite frustrated if he gets upset about
> responses taking more than a few days to come in.

I'm going to assume you hadn't yet read the thread leading up to
Vernon's last message. Here is some historical context which you may
be missing.

The adodbapi package exists in two places, the original on
SourceForge, and the newer fork which forms a part of your pywin32
project on GitHub (migrated from its own earlier SourceForge hosting,
where the incorporation of the adodbapi fork had already taken place).
Vernon has provided no indication that I could find in the SourceForge
project, that bug reports should now be submitted to the GitHub fork,
and in fact there are explicit instructions to file adodbapi bug
reports on SF. Nevertheless, there are bug reports that have sat for
years in the SF tracker for the project with no maintainer responses
at all (I would provide more specifics, but SourceForge is actually
down at the moment), and I recently was advised on this mailing list
that I should be filing my bug reports for the package on GitHub, not
SourceForge.

As far as I can tell, the adodbapi fork in the pywin32 GitHub
repository has been completely broken for at least four years. So it's
impossible to import the adodbapi GitHub/pywin32 fork, much less run
the unit test suite one would normally incorporate into the
preparation of a pull request. Vernon replied to the bug reporting
this breakage (https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/issues/671) in
2014, providing the workaround of installing the original SourceForge
adodbapi, but there's been no movement on that bug since then. He has
at various times since then mentioned the difficulties he has had with
his Windows development/testing platform and said that he's been
working on getting it functional again.

Here's my take on the current situation. Vernon has acknowledged the
problems I just described, has reached out asking for assistance in
getting them solved, and is appreciative of the offer I have made to
help. He indicated that he wouldn't be able to get back to me for a
week or so because of current work and family obligations, and I
thanked him for his reply and told him I was happy to wait until he
was able to come up for air. As far as I can tell, we're on the right
path to solving the problems.

> While pywin32 has moved to
> github, I honestly don't expect the release cadence, nor the amount of time
> I can offer the project to change from what it has been over the last few
> years.

There's nothing wrong with the release cadence. I just don't want more
years to go by before the problems with the adodbapi package are
addressed. I'm trying to help Vernon achieve that goal.

> There's no need to apologize for life getting in the way of maintaining free
> and open source software.

I absolutely agree. However, taking 30 seconds to write "sorry, I'm
not going to be able to look at this until [expected re-engagement
date]" (as Vernon did in his last reply) goes a long way when you're
trying to encourage assistance from your users.

Regards,
Bob