>>I guess I've come across as being too perfectionist. Yes, life is imperfect, that doesn't bother me at all, and I am at peace with life. I have never expected software of any significant size to be bug-free. Also, I've never met a good programmer, who, like you, would not work to kill every known bug they could; I think the problem comes from the business people, not developers.
>
>We do need business people in order to get paid. I'm an independent, so I have to wear a business hat in addition to the programmer hat. I do kill every known show-stopper bug, but I also do table bugs that aren't worth what it would take to fix them. In my current project, I have roughly 3000 total bugs, roughly 300 "tabled" bugs, and about 2500 repaired bugs. This is a system that has been under development for 3.5 years.
>
>I don't see a problem with those statistics. Perfect software is never released.
>
>>Yes, in the pre-PC era, I did work for a number of companies. The ones that did the best quality control were ones who were doing Dept. of Defense contracts; even small bugs (or errors in data) could have devastating consequences). The software I used during development, which came from private vendors, rarely crashed, and could be depended on.
>
>I also worked on DoD contracts early on. There were bugs in every one of the products, and we knew about them.

Since you have been programming 20 yr, this must have started after I left the DoD area. This was not my experience pre-1974.

As a matter of fact, I once got soundly chewed out for fixing a bug that I happened to see as I was doing something else, because the item hadn't gone through the proper channels before being blessed for repair.

I never had this happen to me; I was rewarded for this behavior.

Finally, as you are surely aware, fully 80% of DoD software projects are never completed. Guess why?

Because of politicians who (a) cancel projects mid-stream because of changing political priorities; (b) don't give sufficient budget to cover their demands; and (c) some contractors who try to low-bid, and end up not having sufficient resources.

I still work for the govt (not DoD) and Congress is always mandating something, but providing zero budget for it.

>
>>I guess in this thread, I was asking for the perspectives of how things have changed in debugging philosophy and attitudes over the years, and why. Some of this came about because some of the UT developers were asking for a better response from MS about known VFP bugs, so not everyone is happy with the status quo.
>
>I'm happy with the status quo. I'm not *content* with it, and I would like to see the index bug in SP1 fixed, but Ken Levy is correct in his appraisal. VFP 7 is more than stable enough to use, and is more stable than its predecessors. If MS has decided not to release any more service packs for VFP 7, and is hard at work on VFP 8, I can live with that.