On Thu, 2012-10-04 at 13:16 -0700, Jonathan Wilkes wrote: [...]
Also, I wanted to know which is mature enough so that it's worth to write bug reports to its author. This consumes quite some time and I think everyone who discovers that there are many solutions for her problem needs to invest some time to find out which works best. Personally, I think this is lost time, because not only it needs twice as much time to implement the same thing twice, every user needs to figure out the small differences. Well aware, that this (my) opinion is likely not applicable to others, I tend to think that patches are too much treated like holy cows whose breaking should be avoided by any means. If it turns out, that my patches use an inferior of concurrent implementations, I'd be happy to switch them to the new class, especially if it helps to keep the future clean.
Advocate for the superior external, write crystal clear documentation for it, and write crystal clear documentation for the inferior one to explain why to use the other one. Then get the authors to accept your doc changes (or doc creation as the case may be). That's the only way to ensure that your lost time doesn't become other users' lost time.
You are right. I agree with you that this is probably the best (most pragmatic / most realistic) way to have an influence as a non-ext-dev on the issue.
I'll give you an example later when I update the arraysize help patch.
I'll happily check it, when it is ready.
Thanks for your thoughts. Roman