Ever used BugZilla? I’m sure you have. Frustrated? Dropped support for ever? Oh yes, I understand.Many projects use bug trackers under which BugZilla is a famous choice. Once invented to help the Mozilla team out of its maintenance nightmare it made its way into user support. Some projects do not even provide a user mailinglist anymore. Everything is to be written into the BugZilla engine, even if it’s not a bug but an idea, a comment or just a congratulation to the great product.
However, BugZilla wasn’t made for that. It is not a support engine but a bug tracker. The user is forced to fill out complex forms with some unclear or just off topic questions only to receive an automated confirmation and wait. After some weeks, possibly, he receives another cryptic report only to find that somebody has changed the status of the bug message to “Not Replicable” or “Removed”. No further word, no address of a person to discuss the case with. Is it completely wrong if one suspects that some projects push BugZilla to front intentionally to hide behind undisturbed.
Some time ago I’d posted a bug message to the BugZilla engine of the Mozilla project. A message dropped into my mailbox telling me that the bug message were a duplicate of another bug message. I compared the two messages and found that they were about very different subjects. The other bug message had already two other so called duplicates appended which weren’t. Because there was no other way to contact the maintainer I opened a new bug message in which I argued about the different subjects of the four so called duplicates. My message was removed because “It includes four bug messages. Please send only one bug per message”.
I reopened the message and asked the maintainer if he’d even read it. The message was removed again because of the same reason as before. I opened a new bug message and posted the same text in the hope that it would be read by another maintainer but the same maintainer removed my message and complained about my stubborness. I started a discussion through the BugZilla engine and asked him if he could forward the message to some other maintainer if he’s not willing to look at the case. He refused to do so. I got somewhat angry and told him my opinion about his practice. He argued that he was only a volunteering assistant and not involved into the project. So, if he’s only an assistant, he could’ve forwarded my pledge to a maintainer, I wrote. But he still refused to do so. I decided to stop supporting mozilla for ever. The error remained untouched for two further releases.
This is not worth it. BugZilla shows no pay off for the user, it only supports the developer. You may argue that the user is supported indirectly when the bug is resolved. However, the user needs some address to discuss details with. Mailinglists or user forums are better places for that because many users and developers can discuss the case together. While this is theoretically possible with BugZilla others first have to intentionally detect the bug message (before it’s removed) which is unlikely in an ever growing bug tracker.
I’ve posted a bug message to the OpenSSH BugZilla engine. Except the confirmation I received nothing for about half a year. Two new releases produced the same error which hindered me to install OpenSSH from source. I sent a new bug message with same content. Again I received nothing for about half a year. I was frustrated because OpenSSH is not a simple game but a critical part of my platform that I wasn’t able to update. I posted further requests, appended as comments to the existing bug message, but got no reply. Because there was no other contact address available I posted another bug message in that I complained about the project support. Suddenly about fifteen developers spammed my mailbox with uncensored comments. One only wrote that the GPL doesn’t guarantee support. Ahh? I answered that support isn’t even mentioned in the GPL and fully left to the project. And, there I asked for support and complained about it. He only repeated his opinion. As somebody was about sending me the whole X Window System as email appendix I skipped the discussion and switched to lsh.
For all this stress I had to create a user account. Because so many projects have forced me to create accounts I even had to create a separate passwords folder in my email client (yes, I know that browsers remember passwords but refuse to use this function!).
Over time, learning my lessons and still getting requests to messages I’ve posted last year, I moved over to refuse supporting a project that misuses BugZilla as a support engine or asks me to register. This may sound ignorant but I refuse to waste hours, if not days, for decrypting BugZilla reports, talking to assistbots and struggling with misunderstood developers without the chance for a productive contact to a friendly environment of human beings. Though this is not guaranteed by mailinglists or forums either, these platforms seem to evolve a different, more open and mature character over time. I definetly pledge for more projects following the example and banning BugZilla from the support area. It should only be used for real bug messages, and even then there must be another way to discuss these bugs if the nature of the problem needs more involvement or audience.
About the Author:
The author, Dennis Heuer, is a 34-years old german social scientist concentrating on human-computer-interaction (HCI) and e-learning.
Good bugzillas don’t ask so many questions, and good bugzillas make it clear that you should reopen a bug if you disagree with the reasons for closing it.
But anyway, of course you are supposed to do a little work to help the developer. If you help the developers then they will help you. There is indeed a payoff for the user compared to what happens when the user does nothing.
If you want even more direct attention from the developer then do offer the developers some money.
If you want to improve bugzilla in general, then help with the bugzilla project.
This is more of a rant than anything. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to tell others ‘not to hide behind bugzilla’?
If so, i’m afraid you’ve wasted more of your precious time. I say that because, those who understand the advantage of being friendly toward their end-users most likely aren’t the ones to hide behind a bug reporting tool.
If you don’t like to use bugzilla for certain things, then don’t use it for those things. If you don’t like the way a project is run, don’t participate in the project. If software doesn’t work for you, and the developers aren’t interested in making it work for you, then don’t use it.
Its certainly frustrating when the software is somthing you like or need, but then, you have to recognize that they really DON’T owe you anything, and that includes an easy way to participate in the project. Why is it again that you feel they should be doing extra work just to placate you?
I agree completely with your choice to simply not participate any more. Now why are you whining about it on OSNews? Welcome to life. Accept it like an adult or throw a tantrum in the hopes that somebody might give you your way, or at least sympathize with you and validate your self-centeredness. Do you not see which one your article represents?
What he writes is nonsense because Mozilla has a forum:http://www.mozilla.org/developer/.
it’s about the people behind it, and how serious is the “bug issue” taken.
The problem you’re describing is a very real one: Quality Assurance in Open Source projects is terrible. The main reason for this is clear: supporting users isn’t as uplifting as developing a whole range of cool new features. It is wrong, however, to blaim Bugzilla, because it is actually a tool that, if used properly, can improve user – development team communication in a perfect manner.
The problem is that every project that tends to be popular or grows a little larger, needs people to work on testing and supporting other users. This QA team needs to be very actively involved in virtually all the communication between the developers and the users: they’re a middleman with the ultimate goal of making sure user feedback is used by the developers. However, such a team needs to be formed and recognised. Open Source software doesn’t seem to need any QA. Because the developers are directly known to the community, the communication works on itself, right?
Wrong, which is what the developers will notice as soon as interest in the project grows. In order to better their communication flows, they set up Bugzilla’s to keep a database of their bugs. But Open Source users aren’t too shy and will definately report bugs, making the bug flow too large, which leads to bugs being burried forever.
I know mozilla has a great QA policy, and enough people working on it, however, Quality Assurance is usually a doorstep to becoming a developer, so the teams lose their players. I bet that this is what is happening to the Mozilla project. Also, there are a lot more people using Firefox, so the bug load will be greater as well. Plus, the interface of bugzilla is a bit to raw (in comparison to the http://bugs.kde.org ). In every case, actively asking for help should improve the thing, as wel as a response from a human on every bug that is filed, to give the user the idea their voice is heard.
And to finally illustrate the point of too little QA in Open Source, the KDE project has had a quality team since … februari this year. Around the same time the project had it sixth birthday. It’s a tough learning process.
Oh come on. Telling the public that arguing within bugzilla is not very productive… what for?
If you’ve been unable to find any other means of comunicating with a project besides bugzilla thats the fault of the project (or your’s) – not the one of bugzilla.
It does a very good job at keeping things (i.e. bugs and wishes) organized and if a projects decides (or a user has the impression) that it would be cool to discuss your last vacation trip in bugzilla… well, still that’s not bugzilla’s fault.
This is my oppinion as a simple user who reports bugs and wishes via bugzilla from time to time – mainly for KDE. And there it’s not that great a deal to contact the relevant developer directly via eMail – they can be seen inside bugzilla as well. If that’s not the case with Mozilla’s own bugzilla, then _there’s_ your issue. If it is… well you shouldn’t argue inside bugzilla then
“Its certainly frustrating when the software is somthing you like or need, but then, you have to recognize that they really DON’T owe you anything”
Well, that’s a typical reaction from a developper. If you keep your code for yourself it’s OK. But once you make a code/project public you have to be ready to accept public input. And you work FOR THE USERS not just for yourself. Otherwise just make a notice somewhere ‘this code works for me and I don’t care about other uses’. But that’s probably not the case for Mozilla or OpenSSH… In OSS the user is usually left behind too often. As long as it pleases the developer…
this is spot on to my own usage of projects with bugzilla.
i think the problem is that bugzilla is too complex for a lot of the projects using it. its too big and unweildy.
i find most developers dont even use the bugzillas they setup. and if you mail them directly tou get better response.
caveat emptor.
Oops, accidently hit return…
Well, I can’t say I agree with the author. I find the OpenSSH incident very weird. He uses free software and finds a bug that he thinks is important, but nobody working on it has the same opinion. He gets pissed of because they don’t fix it for him.
You want to see what is a great support ?
have a look to the humble forum the cantus’s author has set…
It’s simple, easy and he always answer to bug report and advice….
<stop> Argh, I’m so screwed… I was looking to the URL and the author did change all this forum, now it’s something in savannah or something like that, register, etc…</stop>
Forget it……..
the 2 thinhs I hate the most :
1) whenever you look for help you have to register to one mailing list, so I use a lot of software and I have 20 or 30
mailing list account
2) whenever you want to tell something to someone you have to register somewhere………..
pffffffffff……
I think the .net passport was good in fact… we should have the same such as my sourceforge account is valid everywhere in the OSS world……..
forget it……
DJamé
If you want to laugh, have a look in the bug “overwriting directory” in the gnome’s bugzilla : it exists for 4 years now and i’m not sure it has been fixed………..
Not every bug is obvious. The result may be (the program crashes), but finding the reason can be very hard. A good bug report is the key to finding those bugs. And guess what: Writing good bug reports is something only few users can actually do.
This is even more problematic with mailing lists and forums. Very often a general bug report is short (“playing file xyz.avi with mplayer fails: I don’t get no sound”), doesn’t include vital information like the OS, version number, hardware used, the program’s output etc. A good bug tracking program (and yes, you’re ranting about Bugzilla but mean bug tracking systems in general or the persons behind it) forces the user to _think_ and to provide more information that the _user_ might not think are necessary.
That you have to register first is SUCH a non-argument that I’m actually laughing. On most mailing lists you have to register first before posting. And if you don’t register you don’t get the answers. Or only by looking at the web archives from time to time. Most mailing lists require you to chose a password.
Same for forums.
I’m working with all four methods of support (bug tracking system, mailing lists, web boards, personal mails to me) and the quality of the bug reports is probably the worst on web boards followed by those on the mailing lists and the personal mails. The ones that actually are reported via the bug tracking system have a notably higher quality because the user has taken the time to produce a proper (or at least more usable) bug report.
It’s a skill all of its own. What’s more annoying is when you fix something or implement a “wish” that is on the project web site and go to the trouble of making a patch and sending it to the appropriate person, only to have your email ignored and your patch dropped. Gotta love that.
> > “Its certainly frustrating when the software is somthing
> > you like or need, but then, you have to recognize that
> > they really DON’T owe you anything”
> Well, that’s a typical reaction from a developper. If you
> keep your code for yourself it’s OK. But once you make a
> code/project public you have to be ready to accept public
> input. And you work FOR THE USERS not just for yourself.
Are you for real? People who VOLUNTEER THEIR TIME do not work for the users. They work for themselves. They can be jerks if they want, that’s their choice as free people. Of course, that’s not the best way to foster a community but it’s up to individuals how to handle their projects.
Yes, it’s a typical response from developers, but that’s because it’s true. THEY OWE YOU NOTHING. You use their software for free. Why should they support you, other than to encourage you to use the software? If they don’t care, then it’s tough luck. Your choice to use the software, their choice to not accept your feedback. Live with it.
> Otherwise just make a notice somewhere ‘this code works
> for me and I don’t care about other uses’. But that’s
> probably not the case for Mozilla or OpenSSH… In OSS
> the user is usually left behind too often. As long as it
> pleases the developer…
In OSS the developer is also often left behind, expected to react quickly to user feedback when they have 101 other things to do in real life including pay the bills and put food on the table.
With such ungrateful users, it’s no wonder some developers are so thorny.
I don’t understand how this article is about Buzgilla at all.
It’s all about people. If they want to ignore you, they can ignore you in a bugtracker, ignore your e-mail, ignore you in a web forum, or anywhere else. Bugzilla is a great tool for issue tracking when used properly, you just encountered an arrogant individual who did not use it properly and missing QA. Ban knives because they can be used to kill people…
read this. sounds like important
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153399
If your not happy with the ‘service’ escalate the situation yourself. Posting the exact same bug, and constantly getting slamed tells you something… try re-writing the bug, try researching similar bugs… give the developer’s a hand. Also remeber you get what you pay for.
Unfortunatly bugzilla is not for the newbie user, but OSS is a free for all, niether open or closed sourced practices are perfect.
// Mozilla Volunteer.
This sounds like a guy that would call a company’s technical support lines to whine about the prices of the products, or return milk to the supermarket because it couldn’t handle two weeks in room temperature.
Having a learning curve and certain rules on how to submit (Four bugs in one report? Come on!) is a GOOD thing, as the signal to noise ratio on many forums has increased a lot lately. Please remember that most of these projects are volunteer work – “I don’t want to read mailing list archives, I just want the answer” is not really a valid reason for those developers.
The author complains that the submitted bug was wrongly duplicated on another bug. The correct place to complain about that is on the bug it was duplicated on. I’ve seen this happen and in most cases the bug is undup’d or dup’d elsewhere. The best way to do this is to say straight away that bug X was incorrectly dup’d and why it was incorrectly dup’d. This may not always work of course.
Yes bugs are left to gather dust. If someone can’t reproduce your problem or nobody feels like working on it then sometimes nothing will happen. That’s the way it goes and the only way round that is to find a someone who does want (and is able) to work on the issue elsewhere.
However at the end of the day the people maintaining a bug database are only human beings. If you moan and complain or abuse them then oddly enough they may take offence and simply not deal with your issue.
Many projects have a Bugzilla but they also have mailing lists too. If you want a big discussion about a problem why don’t you try those? In the Mozilla case ( http://www.mozilla.org/community/developer-forums.html ) the mailing lists are also newsgroups so you can even use something like google groups. OpenSSH similiarly has mailing lists ( http://www.openssh.com/list.html ). You seem to be saying that Bugzilla is the wrong place to have a discussion yet that’s the only place you said you went to despite other alternatives.
I’ve submitted 5 bug reports and 4 enhancement requests so far, and I’m quite happy with the way they have been treated. Two of the bugs seem to have been resolved (I haven’t checked the results thoroughly), and all of them have been answered, save one which I submitted two days ago. Only one of the enhancement requests has been answered, but that is to be expected; they require no additional feedback unless I have been unclear or the developers outright disagree.
Why doesn’t he give us the bug number? Let’s see if this rant is *really* justified !!
I read somewhere an big long article about how to ask things in a good way. telling one to do research in several sources and to fill in with valueable information, and if long, short out whats guaranteed not to be needed or link to logs etc. I think everyone should find that article and read it.
when comes to bug tracking support I must say that indeed is the quality of these better than everage, but they still _suck_. most bug reports I’ve ever seen suck.
Ask people kindly and nicely to follow the practices of how to ask good question and submit bug reports in the system, educate people along the go.
kde’s a bit better at it than some others, but I had trouble with kde’s bug tracking system too. Forums has always been a good place for me as I do research before and do show all, that I understand, relevent information and says that I’d gladly help geting more information out and describing it better.
but again, it’s not really a question of the bug tracking systems, bu about how the user reports the bug.
report the bug in a good manner, with all needed information and be willing to help out, and you will certainly get a better response back.
LSH uses Bugzilla too…
http://bugzilla.lysator.liu.se/index.cgi
Hope you don’t run into troubles; and IMHO, switching from OpenSSH which is (i think) the standard SSH on almost every unix box nowdays only because you’re having problems with a bug, is, silly.
Anyway, I don’t know LSH.
“overwriting directory”? It seems I can’t find this bug in GNOME Bugzilla…
So far, I’ve never got harsh responses for a bug, one was not the project’s fault and all other fixes were implemented.
The problems mentioned in the article aren’t tied to Bugzilla as an instrument, they’re most probably problems in communication. The way your bug reports are treated depends a lot on the way you communicate with developers – be polite, as you should always be with people you don’t know – and whether you show interest in a solution or not. It makes a great difference if you made some research – read mailing lists, look into the code, and offer a fix in your bug report – rather than just filing a new bug to complain.
And, anyway, if your bufg report just gets closed, it may even be that it is not your fault, but it should be obvious that reopening the bug or filing a new one with th same content won’t get any more polite responses from the developers. It is your duty then to think what could make the developers more aware of the problem and not annoy them, if you want to have the problem solved.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I understand that for some projects it is a fine tool. Or not really understand, but I’ve heard someone say so, and I believe them. But why do everybody use it?
Especially distros: Gentoo and Sourcemage are couple of examples for which bugzilla is way too complex. Archlinux uses flyspray (http://flyspray.rocks.cc/), which no-one mentinoned yet. Debian has an excellent bugsystem, usable WITHOUT A WEBCLIENT! Why has no-one used that?
Has anyone recognised that “message” on the homepage from the author of that article? (http://triple-media.com/)
“Werbung macht frei und hilft dem Vaterland”
The base from that sentece is based on the third reich. Any comments about that? There is not commentary about that on the page…
and btw: the “impressum” is missing too (error 404).
The author should check this!
Alright, so your basic gripe is that bugzilla was the only way for you to contact developers on a project, and the bug triage guy from mozilla was acting incompetantly?
Well, I don’t know about moz bugzilla, so I’ll say a few words about GNOME bugzilla. When you post a bug, it gives you a page saying “Email sent to: [email protected], [email protected]“. So what bugzilla’s done for you here is ask all the appropriate questions about a bug, and then forward it to the appropriate folks. What’s more, it’s keeping a nice web-accessible database of the issue. That’s the key feature of a system like bugzilla vs simply emailing a developer.
On a large project, actually emailing a developer personally to report a bug is an awful idea. It’s potentially a waste of their time, and isn’t public: nobody else can jump in with their solution. Do you really expect that a project the size of Mozilla is going to have a page with a list of all developers, for users to randomly pick an address and send their complaints to it?
Now, what about mailing lists? You compose your bug and send it in, and it’s gets sent back to all the people subscribed to the bugs@ mailing list of whatever package. Well, that’s almost exactly what bugzilla’s doing for you: developers register their interest in a certain aspect of the package, and they get bug mail just as if they’d subscribed to a specialised mailing list.
Your OpenSSH example is the greatest demonstration of the fact that a mailing list would have gained you nothing over the bugzilla: when you posted your flame, you got what, 15 responses? So you now know that there were at least 15 people receiving your original bug report. There’s your mailing list. Unfortunately, you were ignored. Just as you could have been ignored on a mailing list.
I think it’s rather telling that you haven’t posted links to the bugs in question. I’d love to see if their tone is equally petulant, since you’ve clearly such a high regard for your own issues.
Very nice
The page is a test dummy and just a joke. The company doesn’t even exist!
“Are you for real?” No :p
“People who VOLUNTEER THEIR TIME do not work for the users.”
I am of these weird developpers who spend their free time working on projects with users in mind. I’m not building a technology just for the sake of building it.
“Yes, it’s a typical response from developers, but that’s because it’s true. THEY OWE YOU NOTHING.”
Yes, I know the hypocrisy you find in OSS licenses (that I use) that say “Oh BTW, if this proram crashes your computer/data it’s all your fault. Don’t blame me !”
Way to go, my friend…
What’s more, it’s keeping a nice web-accessible database of the issue. That’s the key feature of a system like bugzilla vs simply emailing a developer.
These “web-accessible databases” are a great resource for spammers. One should only report bugs using a temporary email address.
>People who VOLUNTEER THEIR TIME do not work for the users. They work for themselves.
Vol-un-teer: A person who renders aid, performs a service, or assumes an obligation voluntarily.
You confuse volunteerism with self-service.
>THEY OWE YOU NOTHING. You use their software for free.
Someone gives poisoned candy to children for free- it must be OK, kids don’t pay for it.
If giving poisoned candy to kids for free is bad, giving crappy software for free is not good either. Free of charge is not excuse for crappy service. Can’t do it well- don’t do at all.
>In OSS the developer is also often left behind, expected to react quickly to user feedback when they have 101 other things to do in real life including pay the bills and put food on the table.
According to OSS, developers code for free because they like to code. If you feel you are not satisfied with that job- leave it. Don’t say “I work for free- go fix yourself.” You’ve chosen to do that work- so do it well. You volunteered, nobody forced you.
>With such ungrateful users, it’s no wonder some developers are so thorny.
The subject of ungrateful users is not covered in Stallman’s Manifesto. Developers working for fun will produce a code so good everyone will be happy. If users are ungrateful (a.k.a. unhappy)- developers do something wrong. They, developers, should not blame users for that, they should blame themselves.
If a developer does not realize that he codes for users, not for himself- it is like city bus driver not realizing that he drives a bus for passengers, not for himself.
These “web-accessible databases” are a great resource for spammers. One should only report bugs using a temporary email address.
Bullshit. I cannot think of any project whose Bugzilla doesn’t manipulate email adresses to make them unreadable for spambots. Just as they do on mailing list archives. You will mostly discover the “username provider com” form, which is not detectable as an email adress even by advanced spambots who are able to convert _at_ to @.
I have somewhat of an obscure graphic card which didnt get autodetected correctly by the new debian installer. I filed the bug report, 2 days later a guy wrote me back and asked some details (how it is looking like under my Mandrake dist). I gave back the details, tried next test release, unfortunately still the same bug. I guess I will try again because it might take some time to get the modified version into the release tree.
However, I do not blame them for not finding the bug, 1st I do not pay them, second I know nothing about the inner structure of the project and third will I make another attempt later again.
have a look there : http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48085
Opened: 2001-04-16 13:49
Fixed : 2004-07-20
watch the comment 27 (I lost 1 weeks of work on my phd because i trusted a regular version of nautilus
)))
@ Mozilla: Yeah they are very slow sometimes, I reported one bug and got an response one year later. So what
@ OpenSSH. I think you got up on the wrong shoe. I got even patches from the coders themselves. Thought OpenSSH code itself is slightly horrible
@ Bugzilla: You have a serious issue. KDE uses it, Gentoo uses it, Debian uses a certain variety of it. So? I got all bugs, requests answered. If you post more than one bug / wish / etc _EVERY_ maintainer would drop it. I user mantis at office and I do the same. one bug is one bug.
Oh, it’s soooo convenient to just sit back and say, “we don’t get payed, we don’t care”.
Anybody taking that position in an argument is a disgrace to the term “software engineer”, and an excellent example for what’s going wrong with the hobbyist software community.
Other examples are “source is available, fix it yourself” and “man xyz”.
I can still remember a time when nobody would call Freeware or Shareware developers “a social problem” just because they didn’t provide source code. Those guys took pride in their software, and were as a rule quick and friendly in their responses to criticism, bug reports, and feature requests. They didn’t sport monsters like BugZilla either.
But then, this is the third millenium, and we’re all happy compliant GPL citizens, now are we?
Sheesh.
“@ Bugzilla: You have a serious issue. KDE uses it, Gentoo uses it, Debian uses a certain variety of it.”
Debbugs is not a variant of bugzilla.
So, um, do you have anything constructive to say? What is a better bug manager? What is a better support manager? What you describe is typical of Open Source projects. Everyone is volunteer. You didn’t pay for anything, so why do you feel entitled? Tell you what. Pay me as a consultant, and I will handle your problems for you. That’s how it works.
What a stupid rant. The author describes how he misused bugzilla by opening several bug reports with same subject, which is absolutely wrong.
If he wanted support, then bugzilla is a totally wrong place for him – almost every project has forums or mailing lists for that. Bugzilla is for reporting bugs, so developers will be able to fix it. All the questions asked there are important, even some may inapplicalble to some bugs.
The fact that author rants that his bug was marked as duplicate of supposedly unrelated bug only shows that author has no idea how software development works. It happens often that absolutely unrelated symptoms have one reason.
I have complately different experience with bugzillas – I reported about 30 bugs to mozilla and about 10 bugs to openoffice – some of them were duplicated or invalid, but most of the were fixed quite quickly.
It’s funny to see people feel that they are “owed” work & support for free. This is the attitude that has brought about considerable frivalous lawsuits. Coffee is hot, idiot.
If bugzilla isn’t suiting your needs for posting messages or contacting developers, use e-mail or their forums–those are specifically designed for feedback rather than bug reporting/finding.
I have used bugzilla and although the user interface is confusing at first or at second, the Mozilla-bugzilla team always responded within 1 day of my “this page doesn’t render properly” report. I really appreciate their work.
If a project’s leader has the “i hold no responsibility for the software’s actions on your computer,” and that warranty, or lack thereor, is objectionable to you, DON’T USE THE SOFTWARE.
If it’s BSD licensed software and you want to make modifications that the developeres don’t agree with–do it yourself OR BETTER YET PAY A STARVING SOFTWARE ENGINEER WHOSE JOB IS NOW OUTSOURCED OVERSEAS: http://www.rentacoder.com or some other freelance website.
Despite the beliefs of many, money is a much better / faster motivator for developing software, rather than users complaining.
To the developers of open source work: THANK YOU VERY MUCH for you work–It’s wonderful that you decided to give it away for free. To those who fill out bug reports, THANK YOU FOR SPENDING YOUR TIME making open source work better or more complete. To those who are “owed” something, start a new project based on your requirements and convice someone / pay for software developers to meet your needs–simple as that. The only people who are owed anything are bosses who pay you to do work–a sale has been completed, the boss has PAID for your time.
The example of giving children poisoned candy is terrible. You can liken it to a trojan horse / virus writer / phisher, NOT a software developer who decided not to include your feature or customize his software to meet YOUR needs.
I feel your pain though, I’ve been begging the developers of Lgeneral to include some features for a long time (since 2002, but to no avail.) As a result I’ve been reading SDL tutorials and slowly have been modifying the game more to my liking–who’d have thought that an uncooperative or in my case an extremely busy developer has effectively forced me to learn SDL programming.
if you remove this post for ranting, fine, but read it all the way though atleast once.
Well, at least the author reported about his negative experiences with buzillas. And perhaps there is indeed some truth within the article?
For example, Bugzillas shouldn’t be used for anything else than bugs. I was amazed when I learned than feature requests are bugs, as well, althought both sorts of user ‘reports’ shouldn’t be treated the same way. You can’t close a feature requests because it’s not reproducible or no developer wants the feature, for example. Dublicates, on the other hand, are good to have for feature requests, because it shows what’s most important for users.
Another thing is that bugzilla might appear scary and complicated for users. On my first visit to a bugzilla, I wanted to browse the database to see if there was an existing entry about the problem. It took some time to learn that this is an unusual way of handling bugs. The usual way seems to be: Just report and let others sort the duplicates out.
Additionally, a sort of ‘support requests’ should also be processed. Being a newbie to Linux means in most cases that I’m not sure if a strange behaviour is a bug, a missing feature, or just my own fault.
I understand if users give up bothering with bug reports, and if bug maintainers slowly get the impression that users must be dumb fools can also be understood when ignorant people do report ‘bugs’ more often than honest people. The author of the article is a nice example since he was obviously made to spam the database.
I would say it’s more like someone giving you a TV (or whatever) for free, and then when it stops working you *demand* that they fix it.
It’s not like the developers have signed a contract or made any promisses that their software will meet all your needs and that they are obliged to provide you with support and bugfixes.
“I would say it’s more like someone giving you a TV (or whatever) for free, and then when it stops working you *demand* that they fix it. ”
The point is a great deal of open-source software for enterprise appilcations are not like TVs. If they break, it might as well mean your job. Support is critical for the success of any software application, commercial or open-source. And bug-fixes are the most basic form of software support. Without a responsive and effective infrastructure for handling bugs, you might as well not develop the application in the first place.
I have had a similar experience as the original poster where I submitted a bug and its fix (considering how it is open-source, and I spent hours troubleshooting the source code) for Apache Commons, and no one ever replied. I find the experience very discouraging since I know that other developers would waste hours of their time troubleshooting the same bug.
Bugzilla is a nice piece of software, and works well for many projects. My friend’s web development company had a lot of problems managing bugs in their system, and so I cuztomized the latest version of bugzilla to work well with finding and tracking bugs in websites.
However, generally bugzilla isn’t very flexible. If it weren’t for the fact that a few years ago I was a Perl monk (but have lately opted for less idiomatic languages), I would have never been able to customize it. Bugzilla must be hacked to manage projects well.
I heard of other open source bug management systems. Scarab sounds promising, but is based on Java so I don’t foresee a lot of open source projects using it too much (despite the fact that Tomcat is a great servlet engine, and Scarab comes with a stripped down version). At least Scarab, though, allows one to fully customize the BMS without having to hack Perl code.
Yes, I know the hypocrisy you find in OSS licenses (that I use) that say “Oh BTW, if this proram crashes your computer/data it’s all your fault. Don’t blame me !”
Looks like you never read a software licence. You will find this clause in most software EULAs, including those from Microsoft.
It’s amazing how many people speak out of their asses….
As for open-source developers… I would say that they are giving some of their time instead of volunteer. They often do the job for no one and they have no obligation. You think that sucks? Get closed-source software. End of story.
Mh. Now someone else is accusing me of not being able to read a license. Like I’ve never done it before. So for people speaking out of their asses (yes, it’s amazing), here is an example of the most simple OSS license, the BSD license :
“IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.”
I hope some people will post more serious messages here.
I think bugzilla is a development tool and really wasn’t intended to be used as anything else. I think it should be used mostly just to let developers know what isn’t working, but it shouldn’t be used for users to fix the bugs themselves. That’s just silly.
he didnt say you were wrong about OSS liscences, he said this is standard in software liscence agreements. do you really think microsoft has legal responsability for what their software does to your pc, or your work?
It’s not like the developers have signed a contract or made any promisses that their software will meet all your needs and that they are obliged to provide you with support and bugfixes.
It cuts both ways: in now way are the users obliged to provide the developers with bug reports – the users could very well say “get yourself a QA team” instead of reporting specific problems, and switch to a different application.
And what good is software without users?
ok guys, speaking as a developer, fixing bugs is the most boring, repetitive, frustrating, and time consuming part of the job. think to what you do for a living. every job has its crappy parts, im sure you all have something you absolutely despise doing. thats what fixing bugs for users is like.
and the users themselves are quite something to deal with. bug reports are a joke 99% of the time. the most trivial matters become blown way out of proportion if the user is obnoxious enough, while the far more important bugs are given a lower priority because the user doesnt make enough noise. and this is commercial software.
open source software is free. the people writing it are doing it because they love what they do. just because its available to you doesnt mean your entitled to it. just because a developer is willing to fix a bug for you doesnt mean he is required to. and if you give me some “arrogant developer” response, just stop and think for a moment. what would you say if you offered to do what you do for free, and then people started acting like they owed you something after taking advantage of the gift you had given them.
if you want your bug to be seen, then be polite. be humble. dont demand. include a detailed description of not only what happens, but what you do to make it happen. if a bug is trivial, filed against a massive project like mozilla, and done in a vague manner, expect things to take awhile. dont demand, request. if you want someone to take the time to read your problem, then take some time to fill out the report properly.
and remember, in the OSS world, you are the user, but not the customer. this is a fairly unique situation. if you want a developer to work for you, offer to pay him to fix your problem, or include your feature. if you dont want to pay him, ask him nicely. if he does it, he’s doing you a favor. if he doesnt, thats his choice.
Free software development takes place in the open, in general. It attracts different types of people. Some are nice, some are not. Some are polite, some are not. Some have an axe to grind, some are willing to expand their horizon.
A lot of the social interaction in groups follows certain, unwritten rules. If one is new to a group, one may have a hard time fitting in unless one knows the rules. That’s why in general netiquette recommends lurking for a while on a mailing list before one starts to enlighten everyone with one’s wisdom.
A Bug Tracker takes away that initiation rite, and gives unititiated outsiders a chance to get a bit of attention without investing theirs into learning the rules of social interaction within the group. If the target audience is a technical one, that can stil be OK. If the target audience is a less technical one, well, that can ocassionally lead to a lot of time being wasted by trying to educate people on both the technical and social aspects of a particular project.
Fortunately, most abusers of such a direct line to a project tend to give up within a short time span. They tend to figure out rather quickly that their ways and/or input is not considered appropriate. I belive that is because most of such people are looking for attention, rather then contributing. If the attention is denied to them, they go somewhere else to get. That’s why “Don’t feed the troll” is folk wisdom now.
Unfortunately. a tiny minority of people have a fixed idea that the world is revolving around them. They take subtle hints about their importance as personal insult. Instead of working on fixing the technical aspects of the problem, they insist on thematising the social interaction as the core problem. Somehow, if everyone dropped everything they do, and did what they say, everything would be much better.
Unfortunately, such tactic does not work very well if one is an outsider trying to ‘shape up’ a strong social group to do as one says. So those people get frustrated, and start abusing the social interaction channels to push their cause, until the conflict escalates. Those people use the economics of SPAM: they try to get attention for their cause by being penetrant to as many people as they can reach.
In short, if every technical community you turn to tells you to go away, you may need some to do some work on your human interaction skills.
cheers,
dalibor topic
I am a developer, and I can understand the developers need for a bug tracking engine, it’s impossible to keep things straight otherwise. And I can also understand the maintainers nightmare of making sure post are of the right form. It is sometimes extremely hard to convince your users to put one bug per post, not to ask for new features in a bug report, etc.
On the flip side I can also understand the frusturation of the user. You want to use a particular piece of software and you want it to work. But, the problem with the Free Software world is that software is not at all about the user any more, it’s all about the developer; if the developer wants something for his own use then he creates something that may do a good job at that one specific thing and then decides to make it freely available. It all depends on what the developer wants in the freesoftware community. I think this is an important distinction between Open Source and free software. I see a lot of merit in the Open Source ideology. However, in the free source ideology I have not heard as many good arguments and I think this is a good example of one of its drawbacks. In commercial software there is a balance between the interest of the user and the developer. IF you don’t pay enough attention to the needs of the user you go out of business but if you also ignore the developer then there is little chance of you being able to maintain a solid development team. In my opinion Open Source = Good but Free Software = Nice at times but overall more evil results than good. Any thoughts?
>THEY OWE YOU NOTHING. You use their software for free.
I believe this is the core of it all. If people who write OSS don’t want to provide user support, then users SHOULD “rant” about it and share their experiences. Software developers who respect their users and fix bugs should be rewarded by people using their software.
Crappy software should be reviewed on the net. It gets what’s coming. Good software should be reviewed likewise.
What is wrong with the world today? Can’t anybody code a 100% bug free application anymore? Sheesh, having to rely on a bug tracking system to fix something that should never have existed to begin with. What’s the world coming to?
Every few days I will get an email from a bugzilla report that I entered for some open source project in the past. What is interesting is that some of the bugs that I have reported are very old (years) and have generated many bugzilla emails, duplicate reports, comments, involving many people. The reports have generated lot’s of talk but few fixes. That is not how the system should work.
The open source projects that use bugzilla need to really appreciate the bug reports much more than they do today. The people who report bugs are very valuable, people who have developed a certain skill set, they have down-loaded software, installed and tested software, and gone to the trouble of generating a bug report.
Just because you submit a bug doesn’t mean:
1.) That it *is* a bug. A bug is something that doesn’t work as described in the requirements. A missing feature or a feature that works poorly is not a bug so long as it meets the listed requirement.
2.) Nobody owes anyone anything. If you want to be owed something, cough up some cash. TAANSTAFL.
3.) Just because it’s a big issue for YOU does not mean that it’s suddenly a top priority for the project. You could be prioritized down to a release 2 years from now. Tough. That’s how it works.
4.) It’s not a duplicate bug or same-source problem as another bug (even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface)
5.) Anyone else cares about your bug. Maybe it IS a bug, but you are the only one that has reported it, whereas another issue has users screaming. Volume matters.
I have a lot of experience developing and working with bug-tracking software (not Bugzilla but similar). The biggest problems I see are not with the tool itself:
1.) People don’t search, then submit duplicate bugs, wasting developer time
2.) EVERYTHING is submitted as a top priority issue, even if it’s really minor
3.) Incomplete reports. Details are very important and are frequently left out. If you make the developer work, they are less likely to fix your issue.
4.) Competing developer priorities
5.) People submit requirement change requests instead of bug reports
A view from one of the people that “hide behind” bug-tracking tools.
I’ve not relased open source code yet but am thinking about it, so I’ve watched forums like OS News, Newsforge, etc. for the last year getting myself educated about FOSS. Trash my input below if you wish, it won’t hurt my feelings…
Bugzilla should be used as a bug tracking tool for developers. That means the public does not have write access to it (it is for the developers – just like their compiler, etc.).
The bugzilla maintainer gets input through a bug report forum or mailing list (in other words – he vets the bug report before it goes into bugzilla).
The assigned code maintainer uses the bugzilla report to establish a conversation with the reporter of the bug.
Meanwhile other contributers are submitting patches through CVS/Subversion….so the assigned code maintainer’s response might just be that it is closed.
I like the mention in a previous response above that duplicates user reports should be viewed as an indicator of the importance to users.
I’ve never posted a bug to a bugzilla backed project because it was just so awful to work with.
In my opinion, sf.net and gforge.net are so much easier to use, I think that if they were easier to set up, everyone would be running them.
It is likely that someone has already said this, but what the open source community needs is an easy to use and set up sourceforge/gforge work-alike.
> I’ve never posted a bug to a bugzilla backed project
> because it was just so awful to work with.
and just how would you know that if you never posted? 😉
So much as it is the result of someone business oriented or in a time critical setting attempting to work with open source. To be brutally honest, open source, by virtue of being an all volunteer project, has zero obligation to the end user.
Open source is a bit like communism in its naiveté – it fails to take human nature into the equation. It removes incentive to do better. What incentive is there for working on an open source project besides “recognition?”
While early on there certainly was recognition for certain developers, in the current sea of distro’s, code, bugfixes and whitepapers it has reached the point someone says “I’m a source maintainer on project ______” and the reply is “Who isn’t?”… So much for recognition…
The only other incentive I can conceive is the end user – The people who actually deploy the code being the ones who maintain it. While this sounds entirely reasonable the average IT manager has neither the time nor the patience to dig in and pour over line after line of code looking for bugs. They need something that plugs in and works as advertised… By the time a bug crops up they are likely five projects down the road and needs it to work yesterday.
Add in to this equation that a user busy fixing his own problems, will have no time to work on other people’s, and it snowballs from there. While yes, if he’s a good little doobie and uploads his patch and it gets folded in everyone profits from it, if nobody else is having the same problem as you, and you lack the skills to fix it yourself, you’re boned.
This leaves open source as a labor of love – A love that can quickly sour as bug reports and user complaints mount. Seems like every time I go to a website for some open source project the first news item is “Goodbye to so and so…” That’s the nice thing about volunteer work; you can walk away at any time. It is also the bad thing about a volunteer based project; your work force can walk away at any time.
Closed source maintained by a single licensee for profit on the other hand is all about incentive. It is in the employer’s best interest to maintain it so he can keep getting rich, and in the employee’s interest so they don’t get fired. Someone gets booted from an open source project you see flame wars galore across the web. Someone gets fired from a job the dialog in the office goes something like this:
Informed IT: “One of the minor coders at Sun got fired.”
Normal Joe:”and?”
Informed IT:”And what?”
Normal Joe:”Exactly!”
There is a reason Red Hat was the first to make serious inroads putting open source in the corporate world – They sold support. Cash in pocket. Never underestimate motivated self-interest when it comes to getting things done right.
So, all of the above considered, it looks like Mr. Hauer expected a level of support like that found in pay projects from open source, an unrealistic expectation at best, a total misunderstanding of what open source is at worst.
Despite all the claims of faster, superior support that is possible with open source, without a real incentive like putting dinner on the table, said potential will never be met. When everyone gets the same thing regardless of how much effort they contribute, there is no real incentive for anyone to take time out of their lives to add their own efforts. The only people who have the free time to contribute to these are usually full time students and/or educators; The most idealistic elements of our society. How many open source projects have fallen to the wayside or been handed off to a ‘new generation’ because the coders grew up and had to get a real job?
The word free means something for nothing. You get what you pay for.
> > I’ve never posted a bug to a bugzilla backed project
> > because it was just so awful to work with.
>
> and just how would you know that if you never posted? 😉
I’ve seen users scared away by the mere look of it. Bugzilla is NOT user friendly… Nor was it ever meant to be.
It is a tool for programmers and experts to share problems, handing it to normal users is just asking for reactions just like this topic.
On several occasions I’ve reported bugs in mozilla’s bugzilla and the bugzilla based issuezilla from openoffice.
I don’t have a clear solution for the problems I encountered but I ran into a number of issues:
– lenthy rants and discussions on bugs cause developers to ignore some bugs. I’ve learned that it is not very productive/effective to do anything with such bugs since your comments will drown in the noise.
– often such discussions end with an influential developer making a choice for the whole community, not necessarily a balanced/informed one. This only leads to more noise because of duplicate reports, more discussion, etc.
– the search interface is not very effective, this generates a lot of duplicate bug reports. I actually know how to use a search engine yet many bugs I report are marked duplicate (for good reasons) despite my attempts to find similar bugs. This is frustrating for both developers and bug reporters.
– some bug reports may end up on the wrong desk and are ignored/misunderstood/misclassified. This then leads to discussion and bugzilla is not a good place for discussions.
– Old bugs get ignored. There are active bugs that date back years, even to the previous century in bugzilla (active as in duplicates being filed, wontfixes being argued against, etc.). I still receive bugzilla spam on issues I commented/voted on years ago.
– many bugs aren’t bugs but changerequests. The reverse is also true (it’s a feature not a bug). The difference is that bugs should be fixed whereas changes may be implemented if someone is willing to do so. Classifying one as the other is often used as an instrument to push certain points of view. This invariably pisses off persons -> more discussion & noise.
I’ve been become more conservative in using bugzilla. I rarely report bugs because I don’t want to get in the way of the people who have to process them.
In a way bugzilla is a victim of its own success. Bugzilla has tools to address all of the issues above. It’s just that it takes someones time to use them. End users using bugzilla means a lot of noise gets in to the system, which means it actually becomes an obstacle for developers who have to read through all the reports and discussions. It’s understandable that there’s only so much time they are willing to that.
Despite all this, buzilla is clearly better than having no system. In the end a bugreporting system is much more structured and effective than a mailinglist. IMHO it is more succesful as a tool for resolving bugs than it is for processing change requests. Maybe a different system should be invented for change requests?
> > > I’ve never posted a bug to a bugzilla backed project
> > > because it was just so awful to work with.
> >
> > and just how would you know that if you never posted?
A few times I’ve navigated through bugzilla and attempted to find out whether the bug I was planning on posting about had already been posted. The navigation experience left me with a desire to not post the bug.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what Mozilla is doing, what they are making, and have been a user of Mozilla since the Milestone M9 days, but a crappy interface is a crappy interface.
The interface leaves so much to be desired, if I weren’t already overloaded (a wife, graduate school, full-time development contract, and two side projects), I’d consider writing my own.
> I’ve seen users scared away by the mere look of it. Bugzilla
> is NOT user friendly… Nor was it ever meant to be.
>
> It is a tool for programmers and experts to share problems,
> handing it to normal users is just asking for reactions just
> like this topic.
Funny thing is, I am a developer. But as I try to produce software that is nice to use and install, I expect others to produce software that is nice to use and install. Of course there is a learning curve to all of it, and I am sure the Mozilla development team preferred to spend their time writing Mozilla rather than Bugzilla, but considering that is their face to the world of would-be bug-posters, would it hurt to make that interface nice to use?
“Its certainly frustrating when the software is somthing you like or need, but then, you have to recognize that they really DON’T owe you anything, and that includes an easy way to participate in the project. Why is it again that you feel they should be doing extra work just to placate you?”
Ummm… the fact that they are using bugzilla to track things would imply that they are interested in d3ealing with the issues.
The author, rightly, points out that a project that uses Bugzilla should be prepared to support it. So yes the projectd DO owe the users something since they implied support when they chose to use Bugzilla.
Essentially projects should not purport to use certain tools if they are not actually willing to use them.
If you want to report bugs, Bugzilla is the right place. Just make sure you spend 10 minutes reading a couple of documents before diving in:
Bugzilla Etiquette
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
Bug Writing Guidelines
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guidelines.html
If you need support, there are two great places:
Mozillazine.org support forums
http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php?c=10
#mozillazine end-user’s IRC channel at moznet
irc://irc.mozilla.org/mozillazine
Stick to these, and you’ll stay out of trouble 😉
Prog.
>> If you want to report bugs, Bugzilla is the right
>> place. Just make sure you spend 10 minutes reading
>> a couple of documents before diving in:
10 minutes? READING?
Come on, really. You expect people to DO that?
It’s like the old joke “I just spent over a thousand dollars on a computer – I’m not going to waste my time reading a book. Just make it work.”
Why cant people spell product names the right way?
It’s called Bugzilla not BugZilla
I have found bugs that still exist today with Mozilla, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and a few other software packages. When I tried reporting the bugs it was a tedious process that went nowhere. If someone has to “figure it out” just to report a bug, then it’s not worth the effort. All of the bugs exist today and have been there for quite a while and mostly affects users in corporations and not a home user, hence the reason the bugs weren’t fixed. I even told a developer one of the problems and they refused to do anything about it except tell me to go to Bugzilla and report it, which was a waste of time.
Another situation in the past concerned Mozilla and Netscape 7. Since Netscape is based on the Mozilla code, and the Mozilla developers didn’t seem to want to fix it or provide an easy way to report a bug, I went to the Netscape site and found an easy “no brainer” way to report a problem to them. The problem was fixed after that.
I too will not fill out or report bugs in software anymore that use Bugzilla or do not make it real easy to report, I have a life and spend too much time with computers to waste my time figuring out another horrible system.
Was this article even read before posting?
I scanned it and found numerous spelling/grammatical errors. Do you check articles before posting them to be sure they make sense? I’d be more than happy to help you proof articles prior to publication. It seems a lot of spelling errors get through the cracks, which makes OSNews look amateur.
(And yes, I know. Not everyone’s native tongue is English. That’s why articles should be proofed by those that speak English well.)
I’m a long time user of Mandrake’s Cooker development distro. Previously bug squishing and discussion was done exclusively through the Cooker list. For a little over a year now (I think? time plays tricks with my head) we’ve had a Bugzilla database dedicated to Cooker. Overall, I’d say its impact has been very positive. The two systems work together; bugs, patches, attachments and comments are crossposted automatically to the mailing list, and when discussion through comments gets too far off the direct bug topic it can be continued on the list. The advantage is that developers have somewhere to go where they can (mostly) find only bug reports and not have to sort through discussion irrelevant to them. Bugs are not “lost” as they can be on mailing lists; they stay there in a status which causes scans to flag them up as needing attention. I’ve noticed a distinct impact on the quality of bug squishing that goes on, especially in Mandrake tools, since the Bugzilla was introduced. That’s not to say the system is perfect, of course, or that some Bugzillas aren’t misused as shields or simply neglected; but when properly used it’s a very good tool.
oh, and for vk, you can access bugzilla without a web client. mdk’s bugzilla has a mail interface – you can create, comment, and resolve bugs via email.
“2.) EVERYTHING is submitted as a top priority issue, even if it’s really minor”
one of the interesting things mdk has done with its bugzilla lately is start tracking bugzilla users. A useful metric you could use here would be to track the percentage of bugs a user reports with different severities. I generally use the normal or severities / priorities and only use the high ones when they generally apply, so I’d get a good score; those who use MAJOR and BLOCKER all the time would get a bad score and you could disregard their interpretation.
your argument is a magnificent edifice of reason which sadly crumbles in the face of the obvious fact that open source produces excellent, well maintained and – at least as often as closed source – largely bug-free software. There are bad open source projects with lots of bugs and poor maintenance, and there are equally bad closed source projects (I’d say probably more).
he didnt say you were wrong about OSS liscences, he said this is standard in software liscence agreements. do you really think microsoft has legal responsability for what their software does to your pc, or your work?
Exactly. If your computer crashes because of a stupid virus exploiting a hole in your copy of Windows XP and you lose your PhD thesis, the only thing you should expect from Microsoft is a “sorry”. Nothing else. And to be fair, you should expect the same thing from Apple, Sun, IBM… Why crack down on OSS when multinational corporations with billions of dollars in their wallets are doing it?
This clause makes even more sense in the open-source world as most developers don’t have any money to spend in a case if one of their application/operating system screws up your computer. It’s simply not their problem… especially if you didn’t got the source from a trustworthy source or if you made modifications to the code.
I think you should have spent more time understanding the proper workflow before you slammed it:
http://www.mozilla.org/bugs/
That said, in agreement with many others who posted comments here, I feel you laid out your “jump to conclusions mat” and went to work.
When criticizing something constructively, people should outline the expected behavior, explain what was received instead, and provide suggestions for a possible solution.
Your discourse did not follow such a path. Instead I saw you explain your actions and continue to conclude that since the end result was not what _you_ desired, the tools you were using and the organization they are affiliated with are sub-par and should be banned from use.
I recommend you step off your soapbox, re-collect your thoughts, and come up with a slightly more constructive way to express your frustration. Your words are taken very seriously by everyone affiliated with Bugzilla.
What’s funny is that if you politely expressed your opinions any number of people would work very hard to _help you_.
I have experience dealing with Bugzilla developers and others affiliated with the Mozilla foundation. They are busy helping people they hardly know everyday while trying to live normal lives.
Ideally, to help the developers spend more time coding, the community should ask questions publicly so answers can be shared and duplication of effort can be minimized. Bugzilla easily accomplishes that. Developers shouldn’t have to spend time re-answering personal questions coming in through email one at a time.
They also shouldn’t spend time reading comments like yours. They all deserve a pat on the back, not a kick in the nuts.
Only it wasn’t Bugzilla. It was the bug tracking system used at the company I work for. Enter a bug with detailed instructions on how to recreate it, maybe even a patch to fix it. Wait a couple years and maybe it will get marked as a duplicate or “not an issue”.
Blaming Bugzilla for bad support is like blaming gas ovens for the holocaust. The only valid criticism of Bugzilla you offer is that you shouldn’t have to create an account and remember a password just to enter a bug. Fair enough.
For better or worse, the strength of Open Source isn’t that your bug report will be looked at and fixed in 15 minutes or you get a free pizza. It’s the fact that the source code is available for you to examine and modify. If it’s really important to you, you could pay money for a commercial application, spend time fixing it yourself, or try an alternative (like you did with lsh).
The author of this “article” had very tough luck.
The first time I tried using bugzilla, I was overwhelmed by its search complexity. I accept that, perhaps the system should have better explained options, but the fact is, when I took the courage to try to use it, I found most of the options can be ignored safely and you get reasonable results.
I posted a “bug” I thought I had found, and received a reply the next day (it wasn’t a bug in mozilla but an error in the CSS page which explorer happily overlooks — it was harder to convince the administrator of that page to change the 2 offending digits in the page).
I found the reply ordinary. Not miss I-Love-Customers (rarely found) on the help desk but an ordinary, polite reply.
So it was tough luck. However, there is no excuse to be unpolite to people, so if the SSH part was true, well, that was wrong of the SSH guys but you can’t do much about it :S.
i like bugzilla and we used in our previous work. But it was almost impossible to customize, and difficult to install. However, once it is installed, it can handle very heay loads.
for the ease of use, if you are developing an open source Application, you can give a try to jira ( atlassian.com , it is not free for commercial use).
– works in all platforms
– works in almost all relational databases
– much easier to install, customize..
or mantis, php+mysql
http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194
http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422
http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552
At least in this case, your problem is that you have installed brand new software on your own, failed, don’t understand enough how to fix things, and blame projects when things don’t work.
Use distributions. You clearly don’t know enough not to.
But even so, the openssh developers gave good and helpful replies
I agree with everyone who said “heh, this article is bullshit. The problem is not bugzilla but the attitude of some people, and/or the QA of some open source projects.”
I seriously do.
but still… I “have used” bugzilla in several cases. And i’ve seen them all. developers like they should be, and developers like noone would like them to be.
recent examples:
– a bugreport abouit kmldonkey where i got the “oops i messed up there, fixed that already” mail after less than 24 hours after i filed the bug
– several bugreports / wishlist items for knode and kmail where i havent got any feedback after more than two years, and which are still at “UNCONFIRMED”
– and the totally evil one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124750
a password revealing bug in mozilla that has been known for at least two and a half years but the feedback from the mozilla developers basically runs to the tune of “yea, we know about that one, but it looks like its really hard to fix, so we prefer to do something else(TM) instead.” read the comments. For all i can think about that one now, i’d say someone should rise that to a CERT advisory. Seems like there’s no other way to get that one fixed.
The dupe: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135188
The re-dupe: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138805
I have about 4 years of mozilla.org Bugzilla experience. I’ve submitted many bugs. I’ve did QA work (confirming, duping, marking as invalid, changing the components, closing, etc.). I prepared test cases (simplifying web pages that Mozilla had problems with to the bare minimum showing the actual problem). I submitted a patch or two to Mozilla code. I was even for some time the “owner” of a Tech Evangelism component (which implied nagging web page authors about pages not compatible with standards).
What did I learn during those four years? Several things:
– bugzilla bug reports are really for bug owners, not end-users. They are supposed to help developers get their work organized. Therefore ranting and spamming is not a way to comment on the bugs. Generally bugzilla is to help the developers improving the software, not to help the users in solving their problems.
– some developers and (especially) QA guys can be really rude, bithing about something because they interpret an obscure bugzilla rule in a digfferent way than you or just showing they believe how much better Bugzilla experts they are. Some component owners have strong opinions what and how should be done in their field and never listen to arguments. People are people, even on Bugzilla. That does not mean it is not worth filing bugs or even arguing it is wrongly duped, really valid, not fully fixed etc. You need just to use some restrain: re-opening a bug three times from the same reason will not make the bug fixed.
– bugzilla can be frustrating for a first time users. That’s why QA people should never thrash bug reporters. You need to be very polite, thanking them for the bug report and explaining why it is invalid, it is a dupe of another already filed or it’s not critical, contrary to what the reporter believes. Some people do that right, some can’t. Funny thing but most QAs I had problems with when filing a bug were Germans. That means there are probably some cultural factors here; you should expect that when people from every part of the planet work together.
So is Bugzilla a good tool? Yes it is, if it used as it is intended. That means as a tool for softare developers not as a end-user support interface.
“We developers gave it to you for free, we owe you nothing.”
OK, let’s get this straight once and for all.
Nobody forced you to release your project under a “free” license. You could have made it Shareware, Giftware, or a commercial product just the same.
Everybody claiming “you didn’t pay me so I don’t fix the bug you found” isn’t a software developer but a plain asshole, period.
There might be lots of excuses. Life can be a bitch sometimes, and you just don’t have the time or the energy to maintain your project.
But the decision not to take money for your product was yours, and yours alone.
OSS developers blame proprietary software companies for not being interested in quality software, but only in selling their next release.
If you take this “owe you nothing” attitude, you aren’t the least bit better than those companies you look down upon.
> Why crack down on OSS when multinational corporations
> with billions of dollars in their wallets are doing it?
Because OSS stepped up to the plate claiming to be “better”, takes the headlines everywhere with rants about how great OSS really is, but doesn’t deliver on the promise.
If you want to be a “sorry for you, won’t fix” type, get into a corporation and make big money. If you want to be a “we’re here to salvate the software world” (read, FSF) type, deliver.
Lemmy wrote:
> and the totally evil one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124750
Let me cite one of the comments on that password-revealing-over-two-years-old bug:
> This makes me wonder (no sarcasm) if what we’re
> seeing is the beginning of what could ultimately
> become the doom of open source: Developers will
> only do what’s interesting or easy for them to do,
> unlike a for-profit corporations where a manager
> makes a developer fix things or else fire the
> developer.
And if you read up on that bug, you’ll find that it would have taken lots of money to change those people’s minds about that bug.
So I’ll have to pay more money if the code is worse. Is that really the software future we want to build?
> And if you read up on that bug, you’ll find that it would
> have taken lots of money to change those people’s minds
> about that bug.
>
> So I’ll have to pay more money if the code is worse. Is that
> really the software future we want to build?
no. it is not. and its because of that attitude that i’m thinking there should be a CERT advisory about this security hole.
I mean, the whole “OSS is inherently more secure because more people have source code access and can look at things” argument is rendered ridiculous by this.
> I mean, the whole “OSS is inherently more secure
> because more people have source code access and
> can look at things” argument is rendered ridiculous
> by this.
And, in all honesty: Have you ever had a look at the sources of a project you aren’t directly involved in? Can you prove all your kernel-space drivers are “safe”, or do you just rely on the fact nobody else has yet raised a cry (that you are aware of)?
In the end, OSS is just like proprietary software, only different.
The problem is that it’s no longer “political correct” to critizise OSS, courtesy to the hordes of OSS chanters out there.
> Have you ever had a look at the sources of a project you
> aren’t directly involved in?
ok, lets re-phrase that: “Anybody who is able to understand the code has the rights to do so, and fix things.”
What I was trying to say is that, in >95% of cases, those “rights” don’t earn you anything, and if the liability disclaimer put there to minimize the risk for an (uninsured) software developer is used as an excuse for shoddy workmanship, the whole idea of OSS turns into a con instead of a pro.
my point exactly.
The problem mentioned here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135188 _WAS_ really a duplicate of 104778.
Creating more bugreports about the same issue (after you’ve been told it’s a duplicate) really doesn’t make any sense and does not help in fixing the bug, either.
Yes, it took Mozilla two years to fix 104778, but still, the bug 138805 was useless, too. If you thought that 135188 was not a duplicate of 104778, you should have argued about that in 135188.
Wow, i find that attitude truly mindblowing. Because code is given away means it must be supported? That is amoung the most redicules arguments i have ever heard. Is it some moral responsability? Perhaps the universe just revolves around you? Help me out, im trying hard to understand where you are coming from.
Does this apply to all walks of life? like, if i donate food to a soup kitchen, im an asshole if i dont stay and cook it? or maybe if i help a friend move, i have to stay and unpack for him too? or if i give away my old car, im definately an asshole if i dont pay for maintenance as long as he has the car. right?
you know, i would consider someone who doesnt appreciate the gift in the first place the asshole. but hey, thats just me.
As a user you may see to completely different poor behavior and see them as separate bugs. As a developer you see those behaviors and realize that it is all stemming back to one piece of misbehaving code that the user could have no way of knowing about and mark it a duplicate.
As a user it becomes your job to STFU and accept what the developer has done. I know in our bug tracking system to close a bug we must verify that all duplicate scenarios were fixed if not the duplicate scenarios become their own bugs.
The guy who wrote this article just likes to complain and some how he managed to get a forum for his complaints on OSNews even though his points are not valid.
This guy’s bio says he specializes in Human Computer Interaction. I deal with the HCI guys all the time. These are the people that want to tell people how to program stuff but not actually ever learn how to program themselves. Listen Tito, if you are so talented and have all these great ideas, why don’t you go buy a copy of C++ for dummies and fix them yourself insted of wasting everyones time with pointless bug reports and rants of OSnews
Reading the author’s bug reports does not really make him look good, especially OpenSSH bug 194. “Do you call this support!” and “I have the right…” does not belong in a bug report, and this clearly shows that neither the OpenSSH team nor Bugzilla is the problem, just the author’s lack of social skills and empathy. Hell, even if he PAID for a product and it was DOA, he should not approach other people that way. I’m surprised they kept helping him after his whining.
I for one deal with four different bugzillas on a daily basis. I would like to see some sort of centeralized bugzilla so I don’t have to remember so many damn passwords. Further more since the bugzilla is part web and part email maybe they should move to a more Forum type design.
stop twisting things. no-one brought up that kind of boilerplate disclaimer as an excuse. an OSS detractor brought it up with the implication that it was something specific to OSS that made it inferior to commercial software. Someone else pointed out that that type of boilerplate disclaimer is common to virtually all software, open source and commercial alike.
@ matt:
> Wow, i find that attitude truly mindblowing. Because
> code is given away means it must be supported?
Code under GPL is *not* “given away”. If you want to “give away” the code, release it as PD.
That being said, no, code “given away” can be unsupported. But *if* you are claiming your product is supported (like in, having a bug tracker online), then you damn better treat those filing bug reports like people who believed your advertising, and are now in a pinch because your software doesn’t work.
Either you support your code or you don’t. There’s no in-between, no “I owe you nothing”. You owe it yourself, and yes, I consider it a moral obligation. If you don’t care about the quality of your code, say so, and people will know your code is unsupported *before* they are relying on it.
> Perhaps the universe just revolves around you?
No; actually I see it from both sides.
I have inherited a project with over 100 open bug reports, some of them already over four years old at the point I took over without ever so much as a confirmation. I strongly believe that it never should have come to that point. Other people have included code from that project into theirs (including KDevelop and jEdit), and it doesn’t stand up to its advertising. So people file bug reports, and I *owe* it to them to either address the issues or officially claim the project “discontinued and broken”.
> Help me out, im trying hard to understand where
> you are coming from.
I come from seeing how too many people today consider themselves “software developers”, picking the cherries from the cake (new features, easy fixes) and shame the tradition of “homegrown” software being the more friendly one compared to Buysoft.
Look at this thread. People nitpick at the three or four bug reports of the author, about how the GPL relieves them of all liability, and that they “owe you nothing”, instead of either telling how *their* project handles things better or spending some thought on how improving things.
A problem in many areas of the OSS “movement”: Too many people defending it, too few people improving it.
I am no exception. I am terribly behind schedule in addressing the bugs in my project. Of course I have excuses – my wife was ill, my two-month daughter makes spare time a rarity. But at least I have a bad conscience about it instead of waving the (L)GPL and crying “I owe you nothing”.
> These are the people that want to tell people how to
> program stuff but not actually ever learn how to
> program themselves.
Another pitiful attitude.
The QA guy in the office next door doesn’t know much about C++ either, but it is his *job* to tell me I can’t submit code without writing test drivers for it. All he needs to do is check the coverage in his coverage tool, and I don’t ask him to write it himself either.
The UI guy in the office beyond that doesn’t have to know a single thing about GTK, Qt, or MFC to tell me my UI sucks from an end-user standpoint, and I don’t ask him to improve it himself either.
Not being payed for your software job might mean you can get away with sloppy workmanship, but don’t blame the messenger telling you your work sucks.