The corollary of who actually benefits from bug reports and yesterday's principle is that the more work you make people go through to report bugs,the less bug reports you get, and almost certainly the less good,detailed bug reports you get (because those are a lot of work ).

Here, 'work' includes all of the various bits of overhead that you makepeople go through to file bug reports, including creating accounts .Also, every question that you ask in the process of submitting the bugreport

I've mentioned this in passing before, but I should be explicit at leastonce. Here is a very basic principle of designing systems that realpeople will use:

The people that benefit should be doing the work .

Okay, there is one exception: the people getting the benefit can payfor the work instead of doing it directly.

You design systems that violate this principle at your peril, becausegenerally it doesn't work in the long run. You'd think that thisprinciple would be obvious,

By bidirectional pipes I mean a situation where you start a subordinateprogram and both write to its standard input and read from its standardoutput. There are a fair number of programs that are programmed like thefollowing pseudo-code:

to, from = pipecmd("subprogram", "rw")write(to, stuff)reply = read(from)

People write these programs, test them a bit, start using them, havethem work, and then one day wake up to discover that their program has