Comment by wly_cdgr
5 years ago
I don't know about you - you might be insane for all I know - but I'm MUCH more likely to report a bug if I think there's any chance of it being fixed
5 years ago
I don't know about you - you might be insane for all I know - but I'm MUCH more likely to report a bug if I think there's any chance of it being fixed
Which is why I've stopped reporting LibreOffice bugs. I have had literally hundreds of bugs filed, with test files and reproducibility instructions. Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost.
With KDE and Mozilla, I'm still seeing bugs fixed a decade after I stopped reporting them. So I might be inclined to file egregious bugs to those two projects, if I feel inclined at the moment to wait a decade for a resolution.
I saw recently twitter complaint about emacs bug filed almost 15 years ago finally getting a wontfix responce(bug was about undo history loss or something). And then they write articles about their new and shiny bug closing process[1]. [1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/08/14/10x10/
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Copy paste the link. Or:
> I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short.
> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
> But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.
In your case, replace version "0.8" by "new bug tracker" or "new bug handling process".
1 reply →
> Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost.
When precisely did this happen?
Within two or three years of forking away from Open Office. I was a Go Office user, when they forked to LibreOffice I verified and copied all my Open Office bugs to the brand new LibreOffice tracker. About a year later they switched trackers, then maybe two years later I think they switched again. So maybe 2012 or so.
Knowing a bug will be investigated would be enough, never mind fixed. Sadly I would assert that the vast majority of open source projects do not bother to respond to reports or even patches. The result of being ignored enough times is that I have become much less motivated to report bugs on projects that might actually care, unless there is clear and present evidence (openly available) that their issue tracker is sufficiently active. If I have to wait more than a week for a reply, you have lost me for good. If I can’t see evidence of the process working, I will not waste my time.
I had much better results with one-man projects, than with projects which have a small army of volunteers and/or of paid employees. In the later case, it feels exactly the same as when I try to get in touch with the various administrations in my area, meaning that I can achieve a similar result by printing my missive, setting it on fire and dancing around it naked.