in reply to Ignoring warnings

Well, you certainly set him off, but you probably could have approached it a bit more friendly too:

Hey, thanks for Module::Foo. I made this change to your module to get rid of the warnings.

Tone is a difficult thing to convey in email. Honestly, you've probably worsened your position by publically implying defects in his character. That's not the way to move forward (even if you hide it behind "a CPAN developer").

Post the technical details of the patch and let shame do the rest. If the author doesn't want to change the module for whatever reason, then life sucks. Maybe he'll think about it more later and make the change, but don't push the issue to get immediate gratification. There's really nothing you can do.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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Re^2: Ignoring warnings
by jdhedden (Deacon) on Dec 11, 2006 at 18:11 UTC
    My initial posting was quite neutral in tone - just one professional conveying information to another - unless you consider the (proper) use of the word 'improper' as being unfriendly.

    However, your advice is good, and I'll try to be more ingratiating in my future bug reports.

    Regardless, I suppose the following is also apropos:

    Never argue with an idiot. They will only pull you down to their level, then beat you with experience. -- Brad Slipiec
    Remember: There's always one more bug.
[reply]
      If we're going to delve into detail, I would agree that you are right about the initial posting, though it might (or might not) have helped to explain why the cast was improper. But the follow up:
      Is there some reason why you think the developers of Perl are wrong in providing the INT2PTR macro? Do you have some justification for not wanting to use it?
      That is both confrontational and sarcastic, which is not a good strategy if you want to influence someone to do something. Now, as it happens, you're right as far as I can tell: in particular the argument that "you should not enable warnings until you really understand them" strikes me as a bit absurd. And furthermore, your correspondent falls into the rather frustrating pattern of throwing around terms like "logical fallacy" without apparently understanding what they mean. That said, he's the maintainer of the module and you're not, and as a result you're now stuck.
[reply]
        ... in particular the argument that "you should not enable warnings until you really understand them" strikes me as a bit absurd.

        I used to agree, until I tried to get some not-terribly-complex C code to compile on several different platforms with several different compilers. There are some awfully arcane and unspecified corners of the C language, and there are some awful behaviors in vendor compilers.

        Where possible, it's nice to get C code to compile without warnings, but there are a lot of cases where you have to make a lot of tradeoffs. Complex casting macros may be one of them.

[reply]

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