Limits to what can be done without source

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 02:31, Andy Green wrote:

> Consider for a moment that you are Mike Harris and this complaint lands 
> on your monitor.  Say you want to help.  What exactly is your next move? 
>   Look at the ATI source to see what has gone wrong?  There isn't any, 
> ATI refuse to give it out.

Did it work in a previous fedora release? Does it work with
other distributions?  In other words, did you change the
interface in a way responsible for the breakage?

> Should you, as valuable resource, then bust 
> out a debugger and spend miserable weeks trawling through disassemblies 
> to try to understand the origin of the problem, likely caused by an ATI 
> programmer that is sitting on the source that could help you solve it in 
> hours rather than weeks?  What exactly can you do to help other than 
> shrug your shoulders and tell you to complain at the guys sitting on the 
> sources?

Provide a documented and unchanging interface so if something works
today it will still work next week.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com