Quality (was [Tinymux] @hook)

[Stephen Dennis]

Normal people without enough hardcode experience to decide for themselves
still need to form opinions about the stability of the hardcode they use.
I've seen reasoning like:

   - Well, X is a good person and treats people in a way that makes me
   feel good, so X produces good code.
   - Well, with so many releases, codebase X can't be very good. It must
   have a lot of bugs to fix.
   - People run codebase X in a certain way without trouble, so it must
   be good to run in all ways.
   - X is a smart person and knows hardcode, so I'll believe their
   opinion.

Really, there is no way to know for certain, but a really good way is to
look at the code, the methods used to find bugs, the rate of bugs found, and
the rate of bugs fixed. Asking someone who should know is a good method, but
I would only encourage the opinion-makers to do their homework on the
codebase in question.

There's also a difference between 'does the code perform as intended' versus
'is the server easy to abuse'. Sometimes a feature does exactly what it is
designed to do, but it exposes an attack surface. So, a codebase may have
added the feature without also adding the corresponding protections. For
games which highly restrict what a player can do, may not place much value
on any built-in protections.

And, in general, how much quality is necessary? Games can open and close
without necessarily hitting a codebase's bugs.

With TinyMUX, I have three versions going at the same time so that users can
control what degree of source code changes they can live with, but this also
means there is three times as many releases. I'm also covering Unix and
Windows, so there several files per release. Finally, I intentionally do
releases to get early feedback from users about those changes -- to bracket
bugs, but also to expose flawed assumptions before it becomes too clostly to
change direction. To overuse a phrase, this forms a small feedback loop, and
small feedback loops are better than loose ones. It is a professional
approach.

Given enough time, the track record speaks for itself. All codebases have
improved their quality over the years, and everyone should be taking backups
anyway.


Brazil
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