ghost@SUN.COM (L. Peter Deutsch) (03/23/89)
Tom Rokicki raises the question of how best to deal with the many problems
(which, in contrast to him, I would characterize as generally small-to-
medium-size) in the present version of Ghostscript.
Bugs reported with fixes will be fixed in the next release, unless I can
clearly tell that the fix doesn't address some underlying problem.
Bugs reported without fixes, but with the text of the file that triggers
them, receive my highest priority for fixing.
Other bugs I do my best to track down and repair, but it may take a while.
Now that there's a significant user community, and some evidence that
Ghostscript is actually considered useful, I am putting more effort into
raising the overall quality level of the program, which I recognize
started out rather low. I welcome any and all suggestions for
improvements and bug fixes; I can't promise to respond to them in a timely
manner, or even to accept all of them, but I'll do what I can, especially
given that I also have a demanding full-time job at a startup company.
I can see that the bug volume is high enough that I should put out
releases with bug fixes a little more often. I was planning to hold up
release 1.3 until I'd finished implementing rendering to 'memory devices',
which would make it easy to write bitmap files in any desired format, and
also finished some programs for reading in fonts in (at least) BDF format.
I also have a backlog of bugs to track down, starting with the 'K' problem
(there's a problem with the capital 'R' also) and a variety of other minor
problems that have been reported.
Something I would really appreciate would be a helper out there in
network-land, in particular someone who would be willing to devote some
time specifically to the X back end. I don't have ready access to a Sun
system running X, and I'm not familiar enough with X to diagnose the
problems easily. Any volunteers?
Thanks -
- P. D.
aladdin!ghost@parcplace.com
...{sun!}parcplace!aladdin!ghost
P. O. box 60264, Palo Alto, CA 94306