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I used to have a zero bug policy in my projects But it gets hard when the users do not cooperate, and there is nothing to reproduce In an open-source app I o
by benibela 6y ago
I used to have a zero bug policy in my projects
But it gets hard when the users do not cooperate, and there is nothing to reproduce
In an open-source app I only got 3 bug reports in the bug tracker in nearly 15 years. And they were not really bugs either, one question and two https problems. I hope it is because I had tested any change for months and have thousands of automated tests. Or it is because the users do not find the bug tracker.
I do get a lot of mails. They are all useless. Most common is, "There is an error message 'Invalid password'". Then I reply that message comes when they enter an invalid password. Then they do not respond. And then I do not know if there is a bug or whether they have entered a wrong password. Then I also test it for a few hours and see it sends exactly the password to the server that was entered
Another project, a http client. Bug report: "untrusted https certificate" on someone else's server. I try it on my system, and it works fine. Then I ask for their OpenSSL version, and do not get an answer. Now what can I do about this? I try it on multiple computers, and it works on all of them
Another open-source project, much more popular. Bug report: it crashes frequently. Because it much more popular and has competent users, I do not have to do anything about it, the users investigate it themselves. Two months later, the user has extracted the crashing code. They remove as much code as possible, until they obtain a minimal crashing program. It shares zero code with my project. All remains are calls to an open-source library and they report it upstream to the developers of the library. I guess there is nothing to do until they fix it there?
On that project I also get emails. They are also useless, because the competent users use the bug tracker. After moving to 64-bit, I get a lot of "it does not start anymore". Guess they use a 32-bit OS
- Archelaos 6y agoOne of my open-source project was quite popular in the 2000s. My policy regarding invalid bug reports was that I did not take them very seriously if they occurred only once for a particular issue. But if I got a second independent email about the same problem, I treated it as a bug in my documentation and fixed the manual.