it's one of the most bug-free pieces of software ever written.
Not doubting you, but do you have a source to demonstrate that claim? If I make the claim to someone else, it'd be easier to provide evidence than for me to handwave.
TeX version is 3.14159265, so some of those are probably bugfixes.
EDIT: Um. Look, I rarely complain about downvotes, but what's up with the downvoting on HN lately? Is it me, or what? This is a simple request for more information about something I don't know about. It's not an easy thing to Google. It's up to the parent to provide evidence.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tex+bug+free shows a lot of evidence that TeX is absent of bugs, but that's not the question. The question is the total bugs that have been fixed since it was first written relative to every other major software project. That's not so easy to answer. https://www.google.com/search?q=low+total+bug+count brings up nothing relevant. In fact, it could turn out to be entirely false that TeX had a low total bugcount over its history relative to its size, especially during its very days. We don't know, because no one has provided evidence one way or another.
All of this is exceedingly obvious, and it's getting tedious to type out huge edits like this whenever something straightforward is downvoted.
I'm seriously tempted to create my own community at this point out of desperation, one that focuses on technical merit and being nice rather than posturing. I wonder if one already exists? I've heard some pretty good things about newsgroups, but haven't really looked into any.
Knuth has kept a very detailed log of all the bugs he has corrected and changes he has made in the program since 1982; as of 2008, the list contains 427 entries, not including the version modification that should be done after his death as the final change in TeX.
Wikipedia is (slightly) out of date since there's 428 currently in the above file, but note that not all of these are actual (functionality-breaking) bugs, just changes; for example, #2 is just a renaming of variables and #425 is an optimisation.
That would be 428 total changes, in a span of a little over 32 years, with the majority of them extremely early in TeX's history - #214 was in 1983, #321 in 1985, #400 in 1991, #420 (a "missing goto") in 2007.
There are a lot of people that would be very happy to receive a check from Knuth for reporting a bug (those checks are rarely if ever cashed, for obvious reasons).
Donald Knuth no longer writes personal checks for finding errors in his books and code, though he still issues a credit for the correct amount at the (pretty sure it's fictional) Bank of San Serriffe [0]. The page I linked to also mentions that he will try to send legal tender to a bug-finder if she or he really wants it.
I've noticed a rash of downvotes on posts coming all at once lately. As if somebody gets a bug somewhere unpleasant and goes to go downvote all of that person's posts that they can.
(Which AFAICT doesn't impact karma score, but does downvote all those posts.)
> I'm seriously tempted to create my own community at this point out of desperation, one that focuses on technical merit and being nice rather than posturing.
I'm down. Email's in my profile if you want to chat about the idea.
I'm aware how the TeX version numbering scheme works. Would you please stop making assumptions about me, from our earlier conversation to this one? I was asking about the total bug count of the system since its inception, and 3.14159265 is at least 8 changes since version 3.
I'll skip the sarcasm and say that yes I realize 3.14159265 is Pi.
Not doubting you, but do you have a source to demonstrate that claim? If I make the claim to someone else, it'd be easier to provide evidence than for me to handwave.
TeX version is 3.14159265, so some of those are probably bugfixes.
EDIT: Um. Look, I rarely complain about downvotes, but what's up with the downvoting on HN lately? Is it me, or what? This is a simple request for more information about something I don't know about. It's not an easy thing to Google. It's up to the parent to provide evidence.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tex+bug+free shows a lot of evidence that TeX is absent of bugs, but that's not the question. The question is the total bugs that have been fixed since it was first written relative to every other major software project. That's not so easy to answer. https://www.google.com/search?q=low+total+bug+count brings up nothing relevant. In fact, it could turn out to be entirely false that TeX had a low total bugcount over its history relative to its size, especially during its very days. We don't know, because no one has provided evidence one way or another.
All of this is exceedingly obvious, and it's getting tedious to type out huge edits like this whenever something straightforward is downvoted.
I'm seriously tempted to create my own community at this point out of desperation, one that focuses on technical merit and being nice rather than posturing. I wonder if one already exists? I've heard some pretty good things about newsgroups, but haven't really looked into any.