Dear OOo testers/ users,
Also, I was going to file a bug, but somebody seems to have gotten plumb fscking paranoid, and although I registered this beta copy I think, I didn't note if any traffic went out on the routers leds at the time), that DIDN'T get me a username/password that I could log into, required before I could file a bug report. Thats bullshit, fresh, warm and usually found behind the male of the bovine species.
Seriously speaking to Sun, if you want bug reports, let us file the $onofabitch without all this username/password bull$hit. My guess is that 99% of the folks who would file bug reports are dissed at that screen and give it up.
I can understand your frustration. Sun wants you to register before filing a bug. Hmm, that's probably because they want to sift out useless bug reports. Let me explain:
Many users file a bug report without knowing what's relevant to the developer and Quality Assurance guys & gals.
They'll have to read them all through, mark duplicates and toss the ones that simply don't contain enough info to be helpful.
This process takes a LOT of time, especially because many users are simply too lazy to first conduct a thorough search
When somebody is willing to go through the initial pain of registering, he or she is probably serious about the business.
I'm a bit irritated about your attitude towards the community of developers who sacrifice their spare time to contribute to the great achievement that OOo is.
Please think about the time and frustrations it takes to develop a project of this magnitude before using those inappropriate rude words...
On the other hand, lots of potentially useful bug reports get lost because of the high treshold put up by Sun.
This will slow down development, but it does limit the time of sifting out bad reports.
Some OpenSource projects take a different route, but unwittingly put up other kinds of tresholds:
For example, take the GIMP.
If you want to file a bug report for that program, you'll start at a Gnome page.
First, you need to find out that the GIMP is considered to be a part of the Gnome project.
To select the GIMP, you need to scroll through a dropdown selection box of 100+ items.
When you get there, you'll need to know what PART of the GIMP failed during it's crash.
Not easy when you are not actively developing the GIMP itself.
Again, they want you to choose from more then 30 elements that I didn't even know to be part of the GIMP.
Need I continue...?
Let's get back from the GIMP to a more general statement about bug reports and the systems used to file them:
Sometimes the developers don't realize that the users don't wan't to go through the hassle of knowing every function library that the application uses.
Users have a different way of looking at a program: they were doing something and then the program shut down or crashed.
Most of the times, they don't know that it was an out of bound index of array x occuring in module y causing a buffer overflow at address a:b
Believe me, they don't WANT to know.
The thing that many programs lack is a good error report that explains in clear language what part of the program failed.
This way, the user is presented with the minimum information that they have to include in their error report.
(I like programs that use a clear log file, so I can at least copy & paste the bare minimums from there)
For users, it would be helpful to let the file a bug report based on the action they took when the program crashed or behaved badly/ nonlogical in another way.
Most actions are chosen from menu's, so if the bug report system would resemble the menu of the program, that would make things a bit easier.
In general, it's easy to make complaints, but it's harder to give good suggestions which are more or less realistic, telling people how to improve their product.
Greenz,
Jorrit Linnert
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