Re: [gentoo-user] Again: Critical bugs considered invalid

["Kent Fredric" <kentfredric@gmail.com>]

> > > Bug reports need to be thorough.  If they do not provide enough
> > > information to reproduce a bug, or at least explain exactly what is
> > > going on, then it is hard for the developers and bug
> > squashers to do
> > > anything about it.
> >
> > Sometimes, as the reported, you miss some important things. Okay.
> > Then the wrangler (or whom else works onthr bug) simply
> > should ask for more information.
> >
> > But if your bugs are always marked as invalid, you loose any
> > motiviation for further contributions. Bug reports are also
> > contribution.

Imo, provide as much information as possible, describe all paths of
logic, dont assume bugwranglers are psychic. Verbosity can be your
friend.
If its marked invalid, then either they've given a damn good reason,
or you've not given them a better one not to mark it invalid. In
either case, if its invalid, keep posting as much information as
possible on the subject, not just the what, but the why.
I'm still at a loss why theres any need for symlinks to the coda FS
when you could just tell firefox to build a profile /directly/ on that
coda-fs.
Im not saying there is no valid reason, just there has yet to be a
good explanation as to why.
If you can't on your own convince a dev to change a bugs status, find
other people with  similar problems to increase the validity of your
claim. Bugs can be like a court room. No witnesses & no good evidence,
a poor testimony, and you end up in jail. So you get all the evidence
you can, get your witnesses, make a nice logical argument, and with
any luck, the wrangler might reinstate its free status ( cos being
invalid dosn't mean that the CC list will suddenly stop working afaik
)

> I can't really argue that one.  I would also admit that I personally
> tend to be a lot more patient in weedling information out of an
> end user.  Comes from tech support training.  Do remember though that
> a lot of techies are not people persons (I know that is not a great
> excuse, or even good grammar).  The founders of the open source movement
> were notorious jerks. :P  It is a matter of recorded fact.  They
> Focused more on the software and let their friends handle the people.

I sympathize with them. The reason devs often tend to be jerks, is
because people of lesser understanding often be as big a jerk when
they envisage a problem which is really a case of "problem exists
between keyboard and chair" or a case of "its not our fault, its
somebody elses", and sadly for devs, there are an awful lot of people
who know very little yet profess to know very much. ( Evidence? in
high school i had one teacher tell me off for doing on a computer
something another teacher had told me to  do, because the one of
lesser understanding didn't obviously have a clue what i was doing,
and thus made drastic assumptions that i was 'writing viruses and
hacking' ....  and that was before I ever did any /real/ programming
work :/ ... work in a company where you have customers, you'll
probably find complications with 'customer doesn't understand, and
thus we have to start again to fix a non-problem' )


> > > if the idea of creating a new profile would not work for you,
> > > then recreating your firefox directory, with "physical" copies
> > > of the symlinked files would do the trick as well.
> >
> > Not really. The symlinks are no problem for FF, it works perfectly
> > well. And I *need* them to store temporary stuff locally.
> > It's mozilla-launcher which artificially breaks if it
> > *thinks* something could be wrong.
>
>
> Personally, I don't realy know WHAT mozilla-launcher is I think.  :P
> I have always just created shortcuts to firefox directly, and let it
> handle everything itself.
>
> > > Imagine if you just sunk three years into a project, and suddenly
> > > someone started attacking you because it didn't work perfectly on
> > > their system.
>
> > Well, I'm working on lots of OSS projects for many many
> > years. But I never ever felt being attacked by an bug report.
>
> It is not the bug report that is the attack. It is the angry
> declarations
> of incompetense.  The insistance that because you do not agree, that
> something
> must be wrong with the developers.  The fact that in just a handful of
> hours
> working with a complicated issue, you declared the community at large to
> be hostile and ignorant.

Community is developer oriented, and thus, nasties and arrogance will abound =).
Just look in -dev for your daily dose of flame war/soap opera. ( if
your going to have a 100+ message  flamewar that started from somebody
complaining and missunderstanding an 'inside' joke, it looks kinda
evident that some devs love arguing for the sake of it... so with that
in mind, play safe, be nice :) )

>
> That is just what I have seen from this situation.  It is not the fact
> that
> you submit bugs, it is the way in which you do it.
>
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

In favour of what Enrico did, although for all the world it seems like
he fought a bit and went against advice, he found a problem, and
provided the means for a solution, and placed it in bugzilla. Despite
it being marked invalid, that bug will remain in there for the rest of
the natural life of bugzilla, and if anyone else out there /does/ have
the misfortune of having the same problem later, they'll find it ( cos
they look hard ), try it, see it work, and say 'thanks enrico for
fixing  my problem' on the bottom. When that happens, maybe it might
get migrated from being invalid, and somebody may consider changing it
for the better, which is one of the fundemental benefits of OSS. You
dont have to actually commit the bugfix into upstream to do a world of
difference :)

-- 
Kent
ruby -e '[1, 2, 4, 7, 0, 9, 5, 8, 3, 10, 11, 6, 12, 13].each{|x|
print "enNOSPicAMreil kdrtf@gma.com"[(2*x)..(2*x+1)]}'
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