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Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

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Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#11
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your website is blocked by McAfee's web filter as malicious.

RyJones, do they give you a "if you believe this is an error url?"

this thread details the whitelisting process.

https://community.mcafee.com/message/240277

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#12
One technique for reducing customer support email is to write extensive documentation. Whenever I get a specific question more than once, I'll add the answer to the docs. It turns out that most customers read the docs before emailing, and in my experience it is extremely rare to get questions that are answered in the docs -- and if, I can just send them a link.

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#14
post #6

Sorry non native english speaker and this confused me a bit "others are operation-based synchronizer" Is it that they only sync with a button push or something and you fetch stuff when content changes on server ?

If I were to guess, I'd say operation based synchronisation is based on syncing user actions and then executing them on the other side to catch up. E.g., user deleted record 23. User added a record with this data. User changed this field to be this new value.

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#15
post #6

Sorry non native english speaker and this confused me a bit "others are operation-based synchronizer" Is it that they only sync with a button push or something and you fetch stuff when content changes on server ?

An operation-based synchronizer is a synchronizer which sends just the changes (the "operations") to the server, rather than the whole new state. So if I add a line of text to something, then it would send back a message to the server saying "this line of text was added".

Presumably, a state-based synchronizer sends the entire updated state every time, but I don't know offhand.

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#16

What a wonderful insight into the gritty world of open-source software. Scratch that, "software that is used externally" is more fitting. I find that the most offensive (in that we should improve and fix the issue) waste of time at my company is when we are treading water during the back and forth communication to a customer while trying to solve a bug. Lack of log files, reproductions, use cases, version numbers, en…

We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the environment on a crash and sends it to us (like Google Breakpad does). On the other hand it opens a whole can of worms if accidentally a private key is sent. Encryption is no solution in this case; the data still is stored somewhere which could be compromised. It's very hard to automatically collect diagnostic data without potentially collecting sensitive data...

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#17
post #6

Sorry non native english speaker and this confused me a bit "others are operation-based synchronizer" Is it that they only sync with a button push or something and you fetch stuff when content changes on server ?

See slide #5 onwards of:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/harmonyslides-2003...

It explains the terms and explores the pros and cons of each approach.

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#18

What a wonderful insight into the gritty world of open-source software. Scratch that, "software that is used externally" is more fitting. I find that the most offensive (in that we should improve and fix the issue) waste of time at my company is when we are treading water during the back and forth communication to a customer while trying to solve a bug. Lack of log files, reproductions, use cases, version numbers, en…

We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the environment on a crash and sends it to us (like Google Breakpad does). On the other hand it opens a whole can of worms if accidentally a private key is sent. Encryption is no solution in this case; the data still is stored somewhere which could be compromised. It's very h…

Yep, the zindus addon has this problem. Very hard (impossible?) to do something automatic and risk free.

I'm not happy with the answer that I settled on with zindus: http://zindus.com/i/reporting-bugs because there is a lot of sensitive information in a logfile.

Even when someone gives permission and sends you a logfile, if there is sensitive data it creates a maintenance burden on your end to deal with it appropriately.

One (not very good) idea: pass the diagnostic data through some sort of anonymizer. Unappetizing because it would involve a lot of work and would need heuristics that could only be learned through trial and error.

Re: Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

#20
I am maintaining Gmvault (http://www.gmvault.org) and unfortunately I have the same issue. I get frustrated because I spend most of the time supporting users. It is good but I have plenty of ideas that I would like to implement in subsequent versions and I do not progress.

I would like to attract developers to help me. Which channel is the best in your opinion to do that ? I use Github so the source is available and the open issues are also public there.

Where would you advertise the need for help to be sure to find some somebody ?

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