Hi, Talking again about open source & personal point of view, NOT about commercial software or products (such as Nokia device...). ext Jonathan Markevich wrote: >>> 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. >> Submitting a bugzilla report shouldn't take more than 10 minutes >> > > 10 minutes is a long time for something that may not help. Multiply that by > say 8-10 open source applications you are interested in, and you see why > it's not worth the effort. 10*10 minutes is still <2 hours. And you've then participated in helping 10 different projects to (potentially) improve! ****************************************************************** >> whereas developer may spend hours trying to reproduce an issue. ****************************************************************** >> Usually there are only couple of developers, whereas users come >> in thousands. Open Source developers do the work free because they >> want to help others besides themselves. You do the math about which >> side should spend the bug reporting effort. >> > > Again, look at it from the user's point of view, please! It's all about > triage. Triage is a cruel and brutal thing, when you define it, but either > you 1) Leave it alone and you're done. i.e. workaround or adapt to the > program 2) spend time on stuff that can be helped and 3) abandon the > hopeless cases. > > More stuff falls in the 1 and 3 categories than you realize. When 7 or 8 > core apps are buggy, you can't afford to report bugs unless it's really > simple, convenient, and possibly even enjoyable (i.e. satisfaction of making > a difference). Have you ever got the "Report this error to Microsoft" > dialog box? That's what I'm talking about. It's fairly similar to Ubuntu apport I think? Ubuntu's lacking MS problem & solution database. Novell/SUSE has something similar to that though I think. However, those are distributions, not individual upstream projects like's discussed here. (Hm... Maybe maemo, as a basis for distribution could offer something here.) >> If you go to effort of reporting the bug and actually reply questions >> on how the developers might be able to reproduce it, so that they >> can start investigating how to fix it, that shows that you actually >> care about the issue and that it's real. >> > > So you say we have thousands of users per developer. Great! The user > should be able to email or whatever saying: xyz is crashing when I view the > records. It means almost nothing to the dev, but if he gets 999 others that > say exactly the same thing, it means the view records routine is horribly > broken. Usually it means that users are using too old version of the SW (e.g. because distro hasn't upgraded to latest version) and therefore wasting developers time. > On the other hand, if he gets 5 others, and notices they're all > from non-latin alphabet countries, the dev is in the best position to put > those pieces together. The DEV can make a bugzilla record. Maybe in > another case he gets 5 others and one of those gives him good detail. He's > on the trail, and the DEV can create a bugzilla record to track it. > > Instead what usually happens is the instant any individual report comes in > the dev starts shouting about how the user should use bugzilla (yet another > application, another big learning curve, and yet another registration on the > net), expecting every user to be a developer or professional-grade QA tester > too. > > That makes the triage for the user easy; 3) dump the program. Regardless of how important you may feel yourself :-), most Open Source developers really aren't doing what they do to please you or get more users, but to solve the issues they have themselves or otherwise find interesting/fun to solve. Having more users is nice only if they help in that, otherwise they are just a drag. As it's possible that users at some later point become contributors, and it's nice to hear that your efforts are appreciated by others, Open Source developers are usually nice for the users (if they behave reasonably). However, Open Source is about a community of people who want to improve things *together*. If you just want to profit from their work without contributing yourself in someway (even to some other project), well, they're not going to miss you. - Eero (also a hobby open source developer) _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
