Bug Zapper

Dear Fedoracommunity,

Over the course of the day I recieved 22^H3 mails from your friendly Bug Zapper.

Most of those bugs where bugs I had reported upon crashes using bug-buddy. Bugs on different desktop tools such as .. synergy, evolution, gwibber , gnome-settings and probably some others

I do understand that I development goes on and on .. and your fancy devs don't care anymore about bugs I reported on Fedora 12 as they are all hacking on Fedora 15 and that I should update more frequently ...

But what I don't get is that non of these bugs was ever touched,
they've been automatically created , and automatically closed

Luis already told us ages ago .. every project needs a bugmaster apparently Fedora replaced that bugmaster with a Bug Zapper.

So can someone please explain my why I should continue to try to improve Fedora by reporting bugs ?

Comments

Adam Williamson's picture

#1 Adam Williamson : Thanks

Thanks for the list. So, from what I see, most of those are Evolution-related. My experience with Evolution bugs is that recently I generally get a pretty quick response from Milan Crha. I'll email him and ask if perhaps he's been treating F12 bugs as low priority.

For gwibber, I suspect it is just a case of f12 bugs filed near f12 end of life getting stuck at the bottom of the priority list.


Christoph's picture

#2 Christoph : Well...

... there is a couple of reasons

  1. We are doing bad, we are not taking care enough of pushing these reports to the upstream developers. It's a shame they are rotting in our bugzilla.
  2. You are filing bugs against the wrong components. ;) Really. All bugs you filed were against GNOME components that are maintained by full-time professional developers and especially two of them are doing really bad. But please take into account that these people are likely to have several hundred open bugs reports all the time. Nobody can catch up with that.
  3. Some of your bugs are duplicates. ABRT should catch them, but at least in the beginning the tool was not really capable of doing that.
  4. Your bug reports hardly contain any useful information except from the backtrace. Next time you submit a bug through ABRT please fill out all fields including "Comment" and "How to reproduce".

Yes, we could do better, but so could our bug reporters. I'm caring a lot about the ABRT reports and I hardly get any feedback from the reporters.

Last but not least it is justified to close the bugs. The code of these components has changed massively in the last 12 months and the backtraces no longer apply to the code.

Next time you file a bug, please look if you had the same crash already with a previous version and can close one of your old bugs in favor of the new report. That really helps a lot. TIA!


Kris Buytaert's picture

#3 Kris Buytaert : Whenever I file a bug that is

Whenever I file a bug that is reproducable I comment on that ..
But as you can see some of the comments and how to reproduce include

"Go grab a coffee", "Come back", "See crash notification"
The majority of those bugs are random crashes ...

And indeed probably some duplicates were around ..


Christoph's picture

#4 Christoph : You mention random crashes

and this is a very important piece of information. Whenever you use ABRT to file a bug, please tell us if the crash is reproducible and happens every time you do something or if it's just a random crash. These random crashes are hard to debug and as they only occur once in a while, they are not high priority for the developers.


fmms's picture

#5 fmms : Bugs

Kris this is a relly bad statistic.

I switched to Fedora for nothing but the good developer ration and realy timely bugfixing.

I have been using Linux for more than 10 years by now. I remember times when a bug reported in the SuSE bugtracker would have attention within a day.

Sadly I think the amount of reports just skyrocketed and the developers have too much work to do.

But there is on strange thing. Most my abrt bugreports have tons of duplicates, your seem all to just occur on your system. Maybe there is some other problem ...


Adam Williamson's picture

#7 Adam Williamson : Sorry

We're sorry about that.

The answer is simple - we don't get to every bug. We just don't. We don't have enough developers or Bugzappers to do it. No distribution does, by the way - every distro bug tracking system I've seen has similar numbers, they all tend to show that about half of all bugs filed get some kind of response from the project, and a smaller amount (perhaps a quarter or a third) are actively worked on by a developer.

There's no way, at least no way I'm aware of, to really change this; history seems to indicate that no software project ever has enough developers to work on every bug. So I'm not going to lie and say that there's something easy you can do to make it better, really there isn't.

You're right that updating more often would help; devs tend to prefer working on bugs reported with recent releases than bugs reported with older releases. It's just the nature of the beast, they're happier working with newer code, they remember it better, it's not like time travelling back to two years ago to fix some code they already rewrote months back in the 'new' version.

Why should you keep reporting bugs? Because we do get to *some* bug reports, and so statistically speaking, you still have a far greater chance of having a bug fixed if you file it than if you don't. It's just not a 100% chance, or very close to it.

(Filing 23 bugs and having no response on *any* of them strikes me as pretty unusual...can you link to them? I'd like to take a look.)