Bug reports: please do them!
Written by jjgarcia on 2012-05
I am sorry. Really, I am. I cannot follow you all in all your usual communication channels: comp.lang.lisp, the ecl forum, #lisp irc channel... But please consider this:
First of all, ECL is maintained in free time. In this sense, it is more beneficial for you if the maintainers spend more time coding than trolling about lisp.
Second, an IRC channel is not a place to look for support. Sourceforge offers you a bug reporting facility (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=30035), a feature request database (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=30035&atid=398056), a mailing list (http://news.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.ecl.general/)...
Response times are usually very fast, and only in the most difficult cases (it involves legacy code, requires some nonstandard architecture, etc), or when a release is on queue, does it takes longer.
In particular, in order to ease your life, bug reporting and feature requests are now possible for people without an account in Sourceforge. This is an experiment and I will try to keep it that way as long as spammers allow. Please make good use of it.
Finally, if you find something does not work the way you expect it, instead of spending a week on it and then complaining about it anywhere, just leave a message in any of those communication channels I mentioned above. It will be more productive for you and for the free software community in general.
Ah, and before I forget it: a good bug report for ECL needs at least the following information: 1) platform information and operating system, 2) configuration options, 3) if it failed at configuration time, the log, 4) if it failed at build time (i.e. during "make") a log of that, 5) if it fails with a standard (quicklisp library), steps to reproduce it, 6) if it fails with your code, ideally some sample to reproduce it.
