Although "disappointing," this IS an open source success story, which is an aspect that the OP didn't focus on much.
After lots of iteration, wvdial got to the point where it worked really darn well. Now, it apparently works really well for cell phone networks, without anyone having to spend lots of money to develop proprietary solutions and iterate/bugfix over time to make them work well.
It's just too bad they don't have unit tests and (thus) people are afraid to mess with the code.
It's just too bad they don't have unit tests and (thus) people are afraid to mess with the code.
Not always connected. Of the software I am using right now, only xmonad and rxvt-unicode have unit tests. Everything else, including the OS kernel, networking stack, filesystem, etc., is completely untested, but is still pretty easy to modify without breaking things horribly. I always unit test my software, but they are not necessarily essential.
After lots of iteration, wvdial got to the point where it worked really darn well. Now, it apparently works really well for cell phone networks, without anyone having to spend lots of money to develop proprietary solutions and iterate/bugfix over time to make them work well.
It's just too bad they don't have unit tests and (thus) people are afraid to mess with the code.