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purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Miro, PyBlosxom, Python, GNU/Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Tue, 25 May 2004

Bug reports from everywhere!

I've noticed while working on PyBlosxom that bugs can literally be reported anywhere. Not only that, but people get annoyed (really annoyed) when you don't respond to their bug report which was reported using a method that I never would have dreamed of. We've had reports in all the following places:

It takes a huge amount of time to check all these places--many of which come and go. It really puzzles me why people don't try to be more social and send bug reports via channels that other projects typically use (bug trackers, mailing lists, and IRC). I've been trying to coerce people into a few standard channels, but it's really hard on a project like this and there's a lot of resistance.

Bottom line is that this kind of thing really affects the project's quality. There are bugs out there that I will never trip over that someone else did but because they chose to whisper it into their pillow at night rather than tell someone about it, the bug won't get fixed and will trip someone else up.

I thought blogs were supposed to be social tools to enhance communities and promote discussion.

Anyhow, we can only do the best that we can do.

[ tags: dev, pyblosxom, python | category: /dev/pyblosxom | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 3 ]

Comments:

Posted by wari on Wed May 26 01:13:05 2004
This is definitely a human bug :)


Posted by will on Wed May 26 09:33:50 2004
The worst part about it is that only some of these channels of communication require the person to leave an email address or other way to communicate with them.  It's not uncommon that the bug report will be so vague or poorly worded that I can't fathom what the person talking about.

And that's hard.  I want to help as many people as I can.  Some bugs people report aren't really bugs--they're just configuration issues or things along those lines.  If the person provides no method of communicating back to them, then there's nothing I can do.  This is true of every project I work on.  It gets pretty crazy sometimes.


Posted by wari on Mon May 31 02:35:00 2004
I believe that the more technically oriented people are, the better they get at producing meaningful bug reports. I'm not really good at expressing myself, but I do try to get details of everything before I start to send out anything.

Here's some example of my bug report: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.zoe.devel/642 and http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.zoe.devel/648 which probably give more details than anyone may need, but if I'm not wrong, this kind is appreciated by developers.


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