
Remember when people tracked bugs? - rwmj
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/02/wow-remember-when-people-tracked-bugs-welcome-to-the-next-level/
======
simonsarris
This frustrates me too. I've run into a laundry list of Browser (mostly
canvas) bugs over the years, 95% in Chrome (my main browser) and 5% in
Firefox.

Typically they'd be ignored, fixed several months later if I'm lucky[1], and
still ignored as they get closed by an automated bot[2]. Chrome specifically
created an "icebox" to automatically close old bugs.

I'm convinced that the Chrome team at least has an internal bug-tracker they
use and the external one (crbug.com) serves the same purpose as fake
thermostats on the walls of office buildings.

(To Chrome's credit, they took the only security bug I filed very seriously
and fixed it in a couple days.)

[1] Unlucky: Still an issue with broken translating gradients in non-hardware-
accelerated canvas: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387>

[2] This bug was ignored, fixed, and for a year I asked for it to be closed.
It was finally closed by a street-sweeping bot:
<https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62373>

~~~
evmar
I worked on Chrome for most of its life. The internal bug tracker was closed
when the product went public (we manually migrated some bugs we were actively
working on, and the rest got comments of the form "if you really want this
fixed, we're sorry to say that you need to refile it on the public tracker").
The real truth is sadder: many bugs are lost, much like yours.

In the old days I (and a few friends) personally reviewed every bug marked
"Linux" and we attempted to triage them, but at one point I realized bugs were
filed faster than we could classify or fix them. That isn't saying new bugs
were being introduced rapidly, but rather that there's a lot of random spam
("my site doesn't work" / "does it work in other browsers?" / "no") and not-
yet-implemented feature requests that appear to users as bugs.

The latest bug on the public tracker is bug number 174163. Chrome was released
in late 2008, so let's round up and say the tracker's been up for five years.
That's averaging nearly 35k bugs a year, or 95 a day, and in reality the rate
was slower in the early years so it's much faster than that now. Even just
reading each bug and understanding whether it's reporting an actual issue
takes hours.

I have come to believe that a publicly writable bug tracker is a bad idea.
Something like what SQLite does (where once users must first establish via
some other mechanism they know how to file useful bugs -- yours look good at a
glance, but I'd recommend attaching the demo html to the tracker so the link
doesn't eventually 404) likely makes a lot of people mad but at least they're
not shouting into a vacuum.

Recently (like in the last few months) I heard they've allocated more
resources to looking at the tracker, so maybe things will improve. It's
honestly just a hard problem.

~~~
abstractbill
This makes me think there's a market for a better bug tracker - maybe one
where people submitting bugs have karma, and you can sort bugs by that.

~~~
bo1024
It's a tough problem. You really want to be able to take advantage of the tail
of contributors -- the people who use one particular product, use it a lot,
but have never filed bug reports for other products. I do think a
stackoverflow-type solution would be worth a shot -- if you post a good bug
report, it will be hopefully easy for people to understand or replicate and
will get voted up, without requiring previous posts on your part. That's if
you have a "crowd" actually willing to look at these things (might work for
Chrome, not sure about small projects).

~~~
hayksaakian
Maybe the starring system can be this?

------
jiggy2011
Sounds like he's trying to report bugs in projects that are either dead,half-
dead or just the work of one guy as a side project.

Before you start using an OS project for anything serious, take a look at
their forums, bug databases and repos.

Is there active discussion from more than 2 or 3 people? Are there regular
commits? How are they handling bugs?

I've considered open sourcing code that I have written in the past, mainly
stuff I built for one project where it serves the purposes of that project
fine. In such a case handling bug reports from users trying to do different
stuff with it would realistically just be a low priority.

jwz rants always make me feel that the author is somehow bitter about the
world not revolving around his needs.

~~~
smackfu
The problem is that ImageMagick was clearly the image handling software of
choice for years and years. So you rationally build a solution on it, then you
find a bug (often a regression caused by an upgrade), and then there is no
support for it. That sucks, and changing to another project that happens to be
well-supported this week doesn't really fix the core gripe.

~~~
npsimons
I was about to say something similar; last I checked, ImageMagick was far from
dead or "just one guy". As I was reading TFA, I was thinking "Okay, two
projects I haven't heard of, might be one offs" but then his retelling of his
experience with ImageMagick made me sit up and take notice. If it's really
this bad, it might be time for someone else to take it over.

~~~
plorkyeran
ImageMagick has been just one guy ever since the GraphicsMagick fork in 2002.

~~~
sciurus
And FWIW, GraphicsMagick has an active bug tracker.

[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=537937&group_id=734...](http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=537937&group_id=73485&func=browse)

------
ef4
Overall it has gotten _much easier_ to report bugs and submit patches to open
source projects, and I give that credit to Github.

It comes down to friction: even if your system is better, it still means I
need to learn your system before I can usefully contribute. If you're using a
well-known system I'm much more likely to bother contributing back.

~~~
IgorPartola
No. It is as easy to ignore a pull request as it is to ignore an email. Here
is an example of this: <https://github.com/taichino/croniter/pulls> and
<https://github.com/taichino/croniter/issues>

There is nothing major in those pull requests/issues, but they are ignored.
This project is great for what it does (lets you parse cron schedule input and
gives you a datetime of the next execution), but the author seems to have
abandoned the project. Now I am left with a difficult choice of using the
project as is, or forking it and and making my own changes. If I fork it, I
then have to monitor whether the upstream author shows up again and then I
have to figure out what to do about his/her changes.

If anything GitHub makes it easier for someone to half-ass a project and then
abandon it as it is starting to get popular. Places like SourceForge had some
vetting that may or may not have prevented this type of thing. GitHub works
well for projects that have lots of contributors, but for a "small library
that does X" it becomes a graveyard.

~~~
tinco
You make it sound like GitHub being a graveyard is a bad thing. Does this mean
that you rather had Croniter not exist at all?

It is simple, you see a project you like. If it has a bug you fix it in a
fork. You use the fork until the project lead responds to your pull request.
And if the project leads response doesn't suit you, you just continue to use
the fork, you can pull from the original project whenever you like.

~~~
IgorPartola
I guess I did make it sound like that. It is frustrating to find a project
that on the surface works, but under the hood has issues all over the place.
However, you are right, it is good that the project exists in the first place.
Otherwise, I would have spent a day instead of an hour trying to solve my
problem.

The issue I have is with project ownership. Forking a project is great. That's
why there are 14 forks of Croniter. The issue is that when there are two
divergent forks, it is not easy to tell what's going on. When a useful project
gets abandoned, we typically don't have a way to deal with the consequences.
Your method of forking and pulling changes only works if I am making really
minor changes. However, if my changes conflict with the upstream in a major
way (say I went about solving a design flaw differently than the newly awoken
upstream author), I cannot proceed. Now if I want to use the upstream version
I have to re-write my own software. Or I could continue with my own version,
but without the benefit of upstream. Both choices are evil.

Instead, perhaps a good way to say "I officially abandon this project. Someone
please inherit it." would be good. This could be done at GitHub level, where
if I search for croniter I could get a suggestion for "Did you mean this fork
of croniter that is significantly more active?" The issue is that then I want
to install the code via PyPI, Ruby gems, etc. and the same problem arises
there.

~~~
akkartik
I can relate with your frustration. Sometimes it's important to you, and just
having _something_ exist is awesome. But sometimes it's not so important, and
I was going through my life fine without it, and seeing the project made me
try it out[1]. Then one can feel sucked in if it mis-sets expectations.

Perhaps if both hackers and users took some pains to set expectations and
investigate codebases in advance (respectively), there'd be less frustration
all around. I've been on both sides of this divide.

[1] Yesterday's fuzzy-autocompleter for vim is an example:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5169062>. I don't really consider
autocomplete to be that useful (mild payoff in small codebases; being laggy 1%
of the time negates all benefit), but it still seemed cool enough to be worth
trying out. I was self-aware that it might lead to frustration (because it did
a good job setting expectations), but to its credit the documentation was
excellent.

~~~
IgorPartola
I agree, it is very important to check whether a given library is maintained
and the quality of the code before relying on it. You should also check for
how quickly the project is evolving. Using the cutting edge in production
means either never upgrading or re-writing your codebase to suite what the
library is doing with the new release all the time. For example at my previous
company I advocated for using the "boring" Django over Pylons/Pyramid/etc. The
latter went through a number of merges and evolution over the time when we
enjoyed Django's painstaking attention to reduce backwards incompatible
changes.

But back to setting expectations, yes you are right. Perhaps being honest in
our README's would be good: "here's a piece of code I used. You might find it
useful, but I don't plan on maintaining it;" or "This thing was a one time
script. You will have to modify it to use it" a la GitHub's Hubot.

The biggest issues come back some time later, when you start relying on a
library, build a business around it, then realize that it has a glaring issue,
but the upstream maintainer has disappeared. You can't always anticipate this.
For example, I believe the following is still a bug in Python's MySQL driver:

    
    
      c.executemany("INSERT INTO breakfast (name, created_on) VALUES (%s, DATE(%s))", list_of_name_dates)
    

(The issue is that MySQLdb has a regex which matches the first closing
parentheses to repeat the parameters.)

The above is an issue that's bitten many people, yet everyone continues using
MySQLdb.

------
nswanberg
Here is how Jamie handles bugs for his software:
<http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/bugs.html>

~~~
Someone
That's not how he handles them, but more how he attempts to prevent to be
flooded in issue reports.

He might be very responsive if you use this way to report bugs or he might
ignore them. That page does not tell anything about it.

------
lazyjones
They still do - just not for shitty projects.

To see how this is done properly, check out for example:

1) Go language issues: <https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/list> (I had a bug
fixed within 9 minutes after posting a few days ago!)

2) the PostgreSQL mailing lists (see other submission regarding "Tom Lane
writes a lot of emails")

~~~
danielweber
If you mean only the very largest projects, or projects with corporate
support, can handle the open source model, that's not very re-assuring about
the future of open source.

Also, it sucks when I need to sign up for something to report a bug.

~~~
dmethvin
It sucks when you run a bug tracker and it's spammed relentlessly because you
allow anonymous comments. It sucks when someone files a legit bug anonymously
and there's no way to reach them for followup or clarification.

------
geebee
This may be a stretch, but do you think there is any chance that the decline
of formal bug tracking may be related to the rise of automated unit and
integration testing?

Obviously, they are different things - I don't think that very good test
coverage eliminates the usefulness of a bug database... but maybe it does make
it easier to get away without one.

Suppose you have a discussion forum, and someone sees a potential bug. In the
past, they might add a bug report. Now, they go to their integration testing
suite and write "URL shortener should provide valid menu links at navigation
depth greater than three" (just to come up with a completely contrived example
that never happens in real life, heh). This still tracks the bug, and is
probably more useful, because now you can't ignore it because there's a red
bar in everyone's dev environment.

I do notice a lot more unit and integration testing these days, so it is
possible that some of this is standing in for what used to be a bug database.
I hope nobody interprets this as a claim that it replaces everything you get
from a bug database, I'm just seeing it as something that might reduce the
impact of the absence of a bug database.

------
howeyc
Oh my.

"This individual doing open source software FOR FREE is not fixing bugs that I
provide to him to fix FOR ME AND MY NEEDS is not fixing them to MY SCHEDULE
AND SATISFACTION. THE NERVE."

Indeed. I feel for you.

~~~
packetslave
That's a lovely strawman you're beating on.

If you actually read the post, jwz isn't complaining that bugs aren't being
fixed on "[HIS] SCHEDULE AND SATISFACTION. THE NERVE." He doesn't say anything
at all about bugs not being fixed.

His complaint is that his bug reports are being completely ignored, and/or
developers providing no way to even REPORT bugs.

I imagine he would be happy (well, HAPPIER, it _is_ jwz) if a project owner
said/posted "this is a one-man show. I'm really busy and don't have any time
at all to work on it right now. Here's a bugzilla/github issues/whatever where
you can report bugs and at least see if it's a known issue"

~~~
vacri
One of the bug reports he's bitching about - the first one he mentions - is
only 3 weeks old.

~~~
packetslave
I'm pretty sure that's his point: that it has become acceptable to completely
ignore a bug report for 3 weeks with no indication that it will EVER be looked
at.

~~~
vacri
I've worked as a dedicated software tester for a team of programmers and I've
lodged bugs for them about the product that they're currently working on, that
haven't had anything done to them in the system for that long. Sometimes there
is other shit happening and that subsystem is on the backburner while it's
sorted out.

Or perhaps the coder responsible for that subsystem has been on holiday and is
working through a backlog. Or perhaps their 'day job' has blown up on them and
they haven't had quality time to look over things.

I think jwz is just being precious here.

------
patio11
If you require an SLA to spell out acceptable timelines for issue resolution
by an on-call engineer capable of debugging ImageMagick, that is probably
something which can be bought, either from the maintainer of ImageMagick or
from third-party providers.

~~~
up_and_up
One place to look for a ImageMagick consultant would be to post for one under
the 'consultant' section in the IM forums themselves
[[http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-
server/viewforum.php?f=...](http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-
server/viewforum.php?f=24&sid=f94cd391723c847aa15004884e7e752a)]

------
pdknsk
Google is very good in not acknowledging Chrome bugs filed by its users.

<http://notchromium.appspot.com/>

~~~
k3n
Correlation doesn't imply causation.

You can't honestly expect that John Q. Public is going to be as successful as
a Chrome team member for getting a bug accepted; I've seen many of the bugs
that get filed for Chrome, and I'd say a fair amount of them are by non-
technical users.

I'd be willing to bet that if you took any non-trivial project and ran the
same metrics on the bug DB for developers vs. QA, you might get about the same
results. When a dev puts a bug in, more times than not, _it's a bug_. But when
QA puts one in, there's a very good chance that they're either mistaken about
the expected functionality, or are reporting a bug that's already been fixed
in trunk.

------
mindcrime
Maybe I'm outing myself in terms of age, but not only do I pretty much agree
with jwz here, but I'm happy to say that we[1] use Bugzilla[2] for our bug
tracker[3] for all our open source projects.

Of course, you might argue that it's easy for us, as we don't have a ton of
users opening gazillions of bugs. It is a fair point, that simply triaging bug
reports can become a big time sink in larger projects. Makes me wonder if some
technological tooling (eg, better "dupe" detectors, etc.) could help manage
the problem.

[1]: <http://www.fogbeam.com>

[2]: <http://www.bugzilla.org/>

[3]: <http://dev.fogbeam.org/bugzilla/>

------
reidrac
Yes, it is very frustrating indeed; specially if I can't fix the problem
myself.

My favourite situation is when I submit a bug with all the information I can
gather and after a year (or even more) a developer updates the ticket asking
if I can still reproduce the problem. Most of the time I can't because I moved
on and I'm using a different software, upgraded version, or simply I don't
care any more. To be honest, I almost prefer the bug is automatically closed
because it won't be fixed (no activity for some time, Fedora EOL, etc). At
least the bot closing tickets can't care more :)

But it's not always like that. I've been submitting bug reports for 10+ years,
and sometimes you get a fix in hours or days. Your success may vary :)

I've found that very popular projects (ie. Ubuntu, Fedora, or GNOME), with a
large user base are suffering of "bugtracker bankruptcy": too many tickets to
be handled properly. I don't know the reason for that, but I suspect it could
be related to automated bug reporting used by distributions plus the increase
of "consumer users" and not "producer users". If the distributor/upstream
relationship is not working (ie. distro packages version X, upstream is
already working on X+1 and lacks of manpower to maintain X), then after some
months you get a mail from a bot :)

</rant>

Anyway, if you think about it... that's a good way of experiencing OSS: adopt
an unmaintained project!

~~~
lizzard
Larger projects like GNOME and Mozilla are developing communities of bug
triagers to help with exactly this problem! For example:

<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugmasters> <https://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad>
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage>

So adopting a little bit of a big project, and watching its bugs come in to
help triage them, is going to be helpful for this increased ratio of consumer
users to producer users.

------
davidw
ImageMagick: try GraphicsMagick instead - the maintainer is a nice guy and
seems pretty responsive.

~~~
rst
Discussed in the comments on jwz's post, where several people say claims of
ImageMagick's death are greatly exaggerated, and it has actually fixed bugs
that still exist in GraphicsMagick.

------
up_and_up
Re Imagemagick issues/questions etc, the OP did it wrong.

You need to post to the Imagemagick forums:
<http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/>

They are extremely active and you will get a response from someone within
hours.

Several of the people who frequent the IM forums are extremely experienced and
helpful including:

Anthony: <http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/>

------
jpswade
Maintaining Open Source projects is hard, especially if it's not funded by
anything but your day job.

You're likely to get a much better response if you make a donation.

------
brownbat
It's a pattern I've run into recently with Google products: I see unexpected
behavior (Voice repeatedly fails to send SMS, Android fails to accept default
action settings, Gmail hosts a 'mixed content' vulnerability...). I run
through a short help questionnaire from Google to rule out the most common
issues, it eventually recommends the Google Support Forums. I search there for
others with the same problem, I find them or not, no one has a solution.

I post my issue and ask for feedback, never see any response.

I just chalked it up to the "support is expensive so we don't do any" model. I
worry that the way Google handles support is spreading to other companies
faster than the way Google handles algorithms or stripped down interfaces.

------
cryptoz
I use GitHub to track issues for pressureNET. When I find a bug, I log it
there. Others have logged bugs there too. I pay attention and respond to every
user who reports something is wrong, fix the bugs as fast as I can and send
out the updates. Updating pressureNET causes a significant drop in
measurements per hour since the update stops the old code. So I lose data when
I fix bugs. But I still track them and still fix them because improving the
software is important.

Don't rant and be rude to all open source projects because you're obsessed
with a few poorly run projects. Open source is in a better position than ever
when it comes to developer accountability and bug fixing.

------
logn
Remember when you paid for software?

~~~
kylebrown
Seems like as time goes on, I have to deal with more and more bugs in iOS and
OS X. I know I'm not the only one.[1] I think I've figured out why: Apple
doesn't track bugs. I just _know_ they don't, even though I don't work there.
Its like they just add features and release a new version, so they can ignore
all bugs reported for previous versions. Crash reports are automatically and
constantly submitted (looking at you Safari), but it never seems to get
better. Gives me the feeling that the bugs are never fixed, just carried over
into every new version.

1\. [http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2012/10/02/finder-
bug...](http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2012/10/02/finder-bug-in-os-x/)

~~~
krevis
_Apple doesn't track bugs._

Couldn't be farther from the truth. Apple's development process revolves
around their bug tracker, to an extent that I haven't seen anywhere else. If
it isn't in Radar, it didn't happen.

~~~
kylebrown
But do they care about bugs in previous versions? Or do they only address bugs
in the current/beta version? I suspect the latter, which means there's a
growing set of non-critical bugs which get re-reported in every version but
never fixed (priority always lower than shipping new features). Otherwise, I
don't know how to explain the seemingly increasing instability of the
software: memory leaks, crashes, etc. I even bought a new MacBook Pro this
year, and maxed out the RAM at 16gb, but Safari still crashes and has the same
frustrating issues like the occasional won't-refresh-local-url-without-
quitting-and-restarting. Such bugs don't get added with new features, they've
been there for a while in previous versions.

------
alcuadrado
Who the hell ignores an email from jwz? That's even more crazy!

------
smackfu
Especially dislike when the only point-of-contact is twitter.

------
pnathan
Bitbucket and github's bug trackers are pretty nice. No, they aren't as subtle
as bugzilla, but I like them.

Speaking for myself, I make a personal point of pride of responding to every
bug that shows up on my bug trackers. Not that it's very high traffic at all.
:-)

------
simias
I've reported a security vulnerability to the KeepassX maintainers (certain
types of keysfiles would be ignored and result in an empty passphrase without
the user having any way to know) and never got any answer. While digging
through the file format (.kdb) I also found multiple oddities (the number of
entries and the checksum of the contents being unencrypted in the header for
instance) that seemed to weaken the format and leak info for no reason.

It was several months ago and I never got any reply. That being said, the last
release is from 2010, so it might be abandonware.

Anyway, if you use KeepassX to store your passwords, be careful, the whole
crypto behind felt a bit amateurish.

~~~
gnud
Keepassx is a cross-platform version of KeePass 1 - they're using the file
format from another (legacy) program, and I doubt they can change it.

I use KeePass2 myself. It uses a new file format, and it's .net, runs well
under mono on linux. And it's definitely not abandonware.

See <http://keepass.info/>

~~~
simias
I'll look into it, thanks!

------
danbmil99
My experience with open source projects is that bug reports are only taken
seriously from people who are involved in the project. That means either you
have contributed code, or you are a serious user who has spent time
introducing yourself in the 'real' forum the developers use (typically
freenode/IRC back in the day). Otherwise, the signal/noise ratio is just way
too low for it to be useful to read through all the reports, particularly if
the project is to any degree high profile.

The assumption is that a 'real' bug will eventually be reported by a 'serious'
user or developer. Maybe that's wrong but that is how it works in the real
world.

------
cpeterso
This comment on Oracle's MySQL bug database is a perfect example: "Moving to
the internal bug DB so the issue doesn't get lost."

<http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=68250>

------
theallan
I run an open source project and I typically use github to track bugs, but I'm
reluctant to have a dedicated bugzilla (or whatever) for the project as ~90%
of bug reports are not bugs in my library, but rather installations issues or
bugs in people's own code. I'm not saying my code doesn't have bugs(!) but
what are often reported are bugs are nothing of the sort.

It would be nice to have a bug tracker, but I just don't believe it would be
used to track only bugs and would thus take up time which I'd rather use for
developing the software.

------
sirmarksalot
This reminds me of a talk by Brad Fitzpatrick about a year ago:
<http://blip.tv/djangocon/keynote-brad-fitzpatrick-5572560>

Basically, if you put your email address in a project, you're going to get
emails from random people for the rest of your life. Sort of like getting a
tattoo, a spur-of-the-moment decision early on sticks with you forever. Just
one possible reason the projects you look at don't have an e-mail address for
the maintainer.

------
thyrsus
I've been quite happy with the responses I get to Fedora/RHEL bugs in
bugzilla.redhat.com, especially considering what I paid for it ($0). I also
suspect that, once a problem is identified as coming from upstream, the Red
Hat folks get more attention from the upstream folks than others.

Based on a small sample, Red Hat seems to do worse with "documentation bugs" -
such as when their documentation described using raidtools in RHEL4, when it
had been replaced by madm (which appeared to me at the time as "missing
raidtools").

------
thesis
I contacted the jPlayer folks recently for them to do a PAID project, since on
their site they say they do custom work. Needless to say... they never
contacted me back.

------
methodin
Seems like we need more Open Source QA people to confirm bugs or gather
missing info. Developers aren't necessarily capable of (for lack of want) or
good at doing that.

~~~
IgorPartola
We need more QA people period. I have never met a developer that wanted to do
QA work. The closest a developer will come to doing QA is automated testing.
There is a reason for this. Doing QA is tedious and involves a lot of work
which may not be particularly stimulating. OSS developers that produce quality
software are fairly rare. OSS QA's are orders of magnitude harder to find.

~~~
philk10
Depends on your attitude and approach... I'm a dev that turned into a tester
as I loved doing it and find it a great challenge. I'm currently helping test
Wikipedia, enjoying it, so might go looking for other projects to help out

------
Macsenour
I worked at a place where I was the only person responsible for the game dev
section of the company, about 50 people.

On my second day I discovered that QA listed a bug as high priority with a
"1", while the developers put a "10" on the highest priority. I think you can
see that there was an issue. They had operated with this system for more than
a year before I got there.

I switched them to a letter system, "A" being top priority, "B" is second etc
on my third day.

Their world changed.

------
kreek
I think it depends on the project/author. First thing I check on a project is
the commit history. Was the last commit a year and a half ago? Might be a clue
:) I've reported bugs to bootstrap, d3.js, and fabric.js. Everyone was very
responsive and each was resolved in at least two weeks. Actually with fabric I
had bugs and feature suggestions which were implemented the next day!

------
shurcooL
I don't think anyone saw this potential bug report for Sublime Text 2 either,
because I made the mistake of posting it in a relevant context rather than
starting a new thread.

[http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/52275-down-arrow-
doesn...](http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/52275-down-arrow-doesnt-make-
cursor-go-next-line-if-text-is-selected/#comment_152988)

------
hotbot2
Set your User-Agent string to "Mozilla/5.0" and try to access jwz's site.

I thought he was smarter than to make stupid assumptions. Is he ever going to
fix this (bug)? Doesn't look like it.

Maybe the assumptions are left over from his experience with Netscape? There's
no RFC I know of that requires some silly user-agent string scheme. But feel
free to enlighten me.

~~~
rwmj
Why is it jwz's responsibility to fix something when you have deliberately set
up your browser to report the wrong thing?

------
belorn
For projects that are distributed in Debian, I have stopped reporting bugs at
the "official" site and opted to use reportbug instead. It might be slower,
but I rarely if ever have bugs being completely ignored. At worst, a debian
sponsor will either fix the issue as a debian fix, or remove the package.

------
armored_mammal
I agree with you as a generalization, but imagemagick is pretty much known to
be a deadbeat project. Give graphicsmagick a go. The maintainer is well known
for working with people who have questions, bugs, and such (if you can forgive
the continued use of SourceForge).

------
FlukeATX
Regarding the "ignored" message sent via Facebook, it's possible that the
message didn't hit the recipient's inbox but the "Other" folder if the sender
and recipient weren't friends. That has happened to me a number of times.

------
raldi
Maybe we need a feedback-responsiveness rubric for open source projects,
websites, even whole organizations, and a site which issues them A+ through F
grades based on the score.

------
mainguy
How about volunteering to run the bug tracking for the project?

~~~
NelsonMinar
Yeah, what has jwz ever done for open source? </heavyirony>. The solution to
"this thing is broken" can't only be "fix it yourself".

~~~
iomike
That's what I use to get from Mozilla forums. Then I moved the company off of
any Mozilla tools since we could get help on our issues. Been almost 10 years
back, so not sure if it's still the case.

------
twodayslate
Emailing developers usually works for me and they are more than happy to help.
I then usually toss a couple bucks their way for the help. It is a win-win.

------
damian2000
FYI, an update to his jPlayer issue:

<http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/02/more-jplayer-grief/>

------
slajax
Simple, don't use source that isn't maintained.

And while your at it don't use terminal green on black for your website
schema. Ouch my eyes.

------
rthomas6
This isn't the generalized case, is it? This is just a short list of open
source projects to stop using/replace.

------
duaneb
I would pay money for a plugin that just detected sites like this and filtered
them through readability.

------
radley
I think everyone is pivoting right now trying to stay in the mobile race, so
they're letting older projects go dormant.

I think part of it has to do with how Apple & M$ are handling the big pivot.
OSX is turning to crap but iOS is booming so Apple is huge. In contrast, M$ is
trying to sustain their old OS and it's not working.

------
friendly_chap
Dat fontcolor!

------
perfunctory
Remember when people paid for their tools?

------
brudgers
TANSTAAFL.

------
martinced
Wow. If jwz was to report a bug, even on a project I did write or maintain
back in the days and that did since then fall into oblivion, I'd still get all
excited!

I mean, seriously, how can someone get an email / FB message / whatever from
jwz and not even _read_ the damn bug report!?

This is beyond me. The guy knows what he's talking about.

Long live jwz, thanks for all you did.

~~~
jiggy2011
If jwz reported a bug to me I'd tell him to go fuck himself , just to watch
him rage.

~~~
vacri
I've been banned from his site. He was bitching about trolls in the previous
day's post. I reported that I read the thread, and I couldn't see the
problematic comments, what was he on about?

He replied that he'd deleted the posts (fair enough), then banned me. Nice one
there, jwz, banning someone for reporting accurately on information that you
_know_ is incomplete for them.

Amount of sympathy for his unanswered bug reports = 0.

