article text is 190 pixels wide in 1600px wide browser window, maybe it should file this bug for me too?
768px in my 1920px screen. Stays that way when I resize to 1600px. Could not reproduce?
I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#22nice. however a more scalable approach would be a metabug site where people could post "it doesn't work" freeform text, and volunteers could accept a bug and resolve it when they had refiled it with the correct project.
uh, I think they made that, and called it StackOverflow
You do know that's nowhere near being the purpose of StackOverflow, right?
Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#23Y'know what, I'll extend the same offer. I'll find any free software project and file a bug. I do it enough for myself, I can do it for someone else. jordigh@octave.org Tell me which bug to file.
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Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#24Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#25I like this. Less so for his actual offer, but more because he is calling attention to how hard it is to do this for people who don't want to deal with a "bug tracking system... optimized for people who spend all day every day working with it". It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc).....one sort o…
> It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc)
Having worked for Mozilla for 5 years (Zack also is a former Mozillian), I actually don't think that the root problem is the ease of use of the bug tracker.
Although bugzilla sucks, we still managed to get a ton of bug reports from external folks. But getting the bug report is only the first step. Once you have it, you need to, at a minimum:
a) Figure out what part of the software is causing this bug. For complex software like a browser, figuring this out often requires deep technical knowledge of the system, so is expensive time.
b) Figure out if the bug is already known. This is again often nontrivial because one bug can manifest in ways that may look superficially dissimilar, so requires an expensive person's time.
c) Collect additional information from the reporter. Most bug reports from muggles don't have enough information to let you reproduce the issue without additional back-and-forth. Since the bug reporter probably doesn't live in bugzilla like Mozilla folks do, they're usually slow to respond, if they respond at all. I've had bugs I worked on a week only to have the original reporter disappear. It's understandable; all this communication takes a lot of work.
d) Reproduce the bug. If you can't reproduce, go to (c).
e) If it's a regression, figure out when the bug was introduced.
f) Figure out if the bug is fixed in alpha/beta/nightly builds.
This is all before you actually try to write any code.
Every step here is more difficult and risky when the reporter isn't a known entity, so as a result, if Zack or I file a bug against Firefox, all things being equal we're much more likely to be paid attention to than if a random person files a bug. It's just a basic cost-benefit analysis on the part of people who already have too much to do.
I'd say that 80% of bugs I fixed while I worked on Firefox were identified by Mozillians (either employees or regular contributors). Which isn't to say that the remaining 20% weren't important -- they were, which is why I fixed them! But those 20% were a lot harder and riskier to fix, and that's not something I can imagine the best bug tracking software in the world ameliorating.
Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#26I like this. Less so for his actual offer, but more because he is calling attention to how hard it is to do this for people who don't want to deal with a "bug tracking system... optimized for people who spend all day every day working with it". It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc).....one sort o…
It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports
Many bug trackers suck in many ways, but the intractable problem is that reporting and tracking down bugs is hard. Each bug takes a lot of work to reproduce (sometimes days of work), and the farther you are from the person who saw the behaviour, the harder it gets to reliably reproduce (their combination of hardware, software and human behaviour triggered the bug after all). Bug trackers are an attempt to transfer some of that cost to the reporting party, and to make reproducing the bug easier. The solution you are proposing just transfers it all back to the developer, though I like the idea of crowd-sourcing bug finding, in many ways this is what github does already.
In addition to that bugs are intermingled with features in the user's mind - what they consider a bug (why doesn't it do this), would often be considered a feature request by developers. What they consider a bug might even be considered a feature by the developers or other users.
I think attacking those problems would move the art of bug reporting further on, rather than making life easy for end-users - reporting a bug is already very easy to do on github say, it's just not easy to do it properly so that your report has a chance of being listened to.
Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#27Normally, I think of ways to increase involvement with OSS communities.
He's helping people, and probably learning in the process, which is great. But it would be even better if he could add a touch of "help people help themselves"; otherwise I'm concerned that the OSS process will feel a little more sterile.
Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#28I like this. Less so for his actual offer, but more because he is calling attention to how hard it is to do this for people who don't want to deal with a "bug tracking system... optimized for people who spend all day every day working with it". It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc).....one sort o…
> It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc).....one sort of like Github or StackOverflow, where we all sort of agree to use that site.
Where they exist, they promptly get overwhelmed by all kinds of stupid shit. Then the devs have to filter through insane amounts of crap and sundry sorts of spam for the few things that are actually useful bug reports. Google code had this going on for a while, if memory serves.
With this in mind, the effort required to file a bug is not so much a bug as it is a useful filter. Yes, it cuts down on the actual bugs filed, but it cuts down far more on all the crap you don't want.
Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
#29article text is 190 pixels wide in 1600px wide browser window, maybe it should file this bug for me too?
