Michael Wiktowy wrote: > TANSTAAFL > Expecting someone to put the bit of effort into detailing their > problems is the smallest price to pay to have them fixed. > > Bug tracking software allows the developers to be a lot more efficient > at staying on top of diagnosing issues than juggling a bunch of > unstructured, vague, ranty emails. The fact that you have to do some > email validation/registration process (similar to signing up for a > mailing list) and you can't just reply back to the bug tracker via > email is an unfortunate consequence of our spam-infested Internet. > It may seem reasonable if you only consider a single bug in a single application, but that's not the real world scenario. What is actually happening is that the developers have the easy side of the bugzilla process, and they're only dealing with the one bugzilla, while the average user is dealing with bugs from a bunch of different apps at once. Don't try and tell me that's not valid. > I found it deeply ironic that the OP complained about developers not > valuing his time while completely disregarding the value of the > developer's time by transferring the entire burden of > mind-reading/diagnosing/fixing onto the developer while the OP got to > vent his spleen in a cathartic insulting email. That is not an > entirely equitable trade. > Yeah, well, in my experience it's more often the *developer* who starts off with the rude "RTFM" and sarcastic comments, not the person reporting the problem. Usually the person who has run across the problem is simply asking a question. The rant comes *after* they get mistreated... > As some guidance from someone who doesn't think registering to a > bugzilla as an insurmountable burden (and to try to steer this thread > on a productive course), some of the things that, in my opinion, would > be important to see in this "bug report" (and why they are important) > would be : > - What software was used to produce the multi-contact vcards? > In my case it was Palm Desktop on Windows XP (which I had to boot specifically for that process - I almost never boot Windows anymore), although when that failed I tried some other converters I found online, still to no avail. While it's *possible* that the Palm Desktop creates malformed vCard files, it's a pretty mature app at this point and therefore unlikely. Even if it is the culprit, it's also a very strong candidate for making allowances in the importing app's procedures. That may not be technically "right", but in the real world it's wise. > (possible buggy production of vcard file in which case you can only > expect GPE to not die on garbage input) > - What OS was the vcard file produced on? (possible issues with > parsing different end-of-line characters among other things) > Everything I was ever taught about programming was to take such cases into consideration and automatically deal with them "gracefully". Especially if you're dealing with importing data, it's a no-brainer to automatically handle such elementary issues as the differences between the text file formats of the common OS's (and their built-in text editors). Choking on something that obvious is unforgivable. > - A test case, aka simplified sample, of the vcard file that is > causing the issue. (would be able to quickly determine if it was bad > input, bad parsing, special character encoding, etc.) > This is a lot more work than you think. Especially with regard to contact information, you're often dealing with *very* sensitive information, and therefore are not at liberty to supply the original file. That means that coming up with an example test case involves creating a complete new source. That's not nearly as easy or reasonable as you make it sound. > - When the issue started or has it been there from day-one? (to > determine if it was a regression in recent changes to quickly > pin-point the source of the bad code) > A perfect example of how the heck am I supposed to know that? I just installed gpe, and just tried the import. There's absolutely no way for me to know how long the bug has existed, and no reason that I should anyway. > - What hardware/OS is GPE being used on? (to see if the developer has > the right platform to test the fix or has to rely on the user to test > it) > N800, OS2008 #2 (the latest, although the situation was the same with OS2008 #1). > Hopefully the OP can fill in these gaps because no one else can. > > /Mike > I answered these questions in good faith, and I know that there's someone on the list who can make use of the information. I'm not going to bugzilla with it, though. Mark _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
