[bklaasen]

This is why I detest talk about "quality" in software. Quality isn't an inherent property - it's a relationship between you and the software. What you might regard as a limitation I might regard as a showstopper.

It's that failure to appreciate quality as a relationship which is the confusion.

[wcoenen]

Quality is also about other relationships between the software and its environment. It's not just the user and one piece of software in a vacuum.

Imagine being a developer of some windows software, and a QA person in your team notices that the software can't save to "aux.foo". You explain that this is a limitation of the Windows OS and you can't fix this. But QA insists that this is a "showstopper", and management agrees.

So you do a bit more research and you discover the work-around with the "\\?\" path prefix. You implement the "fix". Now QA discovers that they can save to "aux.foo", but windows explorer has weird issues with it, and they can't open the file in a text editor, and the file doesn't get backed up anymore, etc.

Wouldn't it have been better to accept the limitation instead of calling it a showstopper?

[ryacko]

I wish Microsoft would just accept that no one will use Internet Explorer and devote resources to breaking MS-DOS compatibility.