
$1,000 to fix open source bugs - will_critchlow
https://www.hiremarshal.com/blog/hiremarshal/1000-to-fix-open-source-bugs-launching-hire-marshal/
======
joe_the_user
Proposal 1: There are two XML files that keep track of recently used
documents. Gnome panels only looks at one - it's the one that Open Office
doesn't use. Makes "recently used documents" crap. Fix that. I could probably
do that in a week if I knew $1000 was there (out of a project I'm doing, I've
learned a fair amount about the Linux desktop, I program c++ and I am
available - reply here).

But this is the "100 paper cuts" thing. I use and curse Gnome daily. I could
list ten more if I had any belief there'd be action. $1000 is a week's worth
of action if you sell yourself _really_ cheap.

Rant 1: If you look at a given "bug list" for any large project you'll find a
dozen problems posted where the reply is a very curt "will-not-fix/not-a-
bug/your-configuration-is-wrong". It feels generally snarky and unwelcoming,
especially when I'm searching for a solution to the same bug. If someone could
figure out protocol that would make bug-reporters _feel more welcome_ , it
would really help the process. As developer, I know that, in fact, a lot of
things people see really aren't bugs but expected behavior/configuration
problems. BUT!, BUT... you have to create an atmosphere of involvement if you
want people involved.

Proposal/Rant 2: The format for menus in Gnome is the convoluted piece of
trash that anyone ever foolish - how freedesktop could possibly publish it as
a "standard" is beyond me. It needs to be junked and replaced with a simple
approach. (And suspect this format is why panels has notable, annoying delay
to be displayed even on modern hardware that should show stuff instantly).

Proposal/Rant 2: Scribus has a zillion bugs I'd love to see fixed. I have a
private list I keep out of frustration. I won't bother pasting it here unless
I see more interest. It's more likely that Inkscape will become a viable DTP
project through supporting multiple pages than that Scribus will ever stop
being a piece of total garbage - because it's really hard fix large, poorly
coded project. Yes, I've used Scribus, a lot sadly.

~~~
will_critchlow
Hey Joe. Yours was the top-rated comment at the deadline so I'm trying to pull
out a plan for what we fix, in what order.

The "recently used documents" seems like the most specific bug / fix that we
might be able to get done first.

However, am I right in thinking that what you are seeking is essentially this:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/openoffice/+bug/66933>

If so, it looks like it has been fixed (or am I misreading the bug)?

------
bokchoi
Here's an annoying Gnome Panel bug that's been open for years:

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
panel/+bug/4...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
panel/+bug/44082) <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341441>

Changing the resolution of the display (ie., dock/undock laptop) causes the
panel icons to shift around. The bug is marked fixed, but it isn't.

~~~
someone_here
The issue is the way that the position of the icons is set by the user. By
default, gnome sets the left-most icons to negative numbers as a position, and
the right-most icons to some very high numbers. When a user clicks and drags
their own applets to the panel, they are considered absolute positions and set
their position in pixels.

The fix would involve an overhaul of the interface used to add icons to the
panel, and it would not fix any existing panel configurations. It would also
require at least some sort of an extra step of understanding for the user (Do
you mean left justified, right justified, or absolutly positioned?) and some
interesting Gnome-panel rendering hacks.

This is a lot of work for something that doesn't affect a lot of users, as
most users do not customize their panels, and of those that do probably are
not changing their resolution often. If someone who wanted to work on user
interface hacking worked on other parts, such as improving file system access,
preferences configuration, or even login screens, it would be more appreciated
by more users.

~~~
joe_the_user
This is exactly the kind of "reply" that seems to keep the open desktop
crappy.

Sure, it takes work and testing to get a UI into a condition that seems, to
the end-user, to just work

BUT that kind of work, each in the small end-cases that only come up
ocassionally, is needed. Sure _"that doesn't affect a lot of users..."_.. yeah
it will continue to "not effect a lot of users"* as long your usability sucks
and not one uses the thing...

An app or desktop or whatever needs to fully implement the features it claims
to have. And it is often true that the last yard turns out to cost as much as
the rest put together. Yes but the last yard is necessary. I can understand if
it won't get done 'cause there's not enough time or money. But the _attitude_
that it shouldn't get done 'cause "that doesn't affect a lot of users" makes
my blood boil. Sorry, I'm sure people put lots of effort into this stuff but I
just have to get this off my chest.

~~~
someone_here
Look at it this way: Currently, there are a lot of problems with Ubuntu's user
interface. The crappy way it deals with shortcuts when you click a menu. The
ridiculous way that the calender flyout stays on top. The un-customizable log-
in screen. The lack of vertical panel applets. The list goes on.

This complaint is similar to desktop icons not maintaining their position when
you change desktop resolution. It requires far more work than changing the way
the backend handles shortcut keys (to fix the menu bug), and doesn't improve
most people's experience.

I'm not saying you're wrong! This is a legitimate problem! I'm simply saying
that it's not a priority, similar to how it's not a priority for Apple to
expose a user interface to customize the button layout on their windowing
engine, or fix their dock to work properly in vertical mode. All projects have
priorities, open source and closed source, and this bug doesn't seem very
important to me.

~~~
msbarnett
I think he has a point insofar as Ubuntu's user interface has thousands of
small usability issues like the one he mentioned; each of them a corner case
that impacts a tiny subset of end users, and so each tends to get individually
brushed aside because the fix would require a lot of hard work (polishing is,
after all, about doing a lot of hard work), and wouldn't benefit that many
people vs rewriting-the-audio-layer-yet-again or how-about-a-new-HAL-this-one-
is-almost-mature or some other big/sexy project with mindshare.

The problem with that thinking is that all of those little corner cases, in
aggregate, create a situation in which you are constantly encountering little
unpolished, sharp edged bits of ungainly behavior, and it's never going to go
away until people reject CADT-type behavior and realize that polishing enough
corner-cases for small subsets benefits large majorities in aggregate.

Shuttleworth seems cognizant of this with his support for the paper-cuts
project, but there's too little of this polishing going on upstream for a
100-odd little fixes per-release effort to really tip the balance too far
towards improvement.

------
someone_here
There aren't actually a lot of open source bugs that bother me that anyone
here can fix. If you go on Launchpad, for instance, you'll see that the
majority of important bugs relate to hardware compatability, Flash, and WiFi
firmware. [1]

However, if we can call _features_ a bug, I would really like some better
graphical frameworks for HTML5 a-la Flixel or Flashpunk for Flash. As a game
developer, I would love this, even if it's simple or bare bones, as it would
send me in the right direction and show me some best practices.

[1]
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-heat)

~~~
will_critchlow
I'm running through digging out a plan of action - this was the 2nd in the
list at the chosen moment in time. I don't know what specific action we could
take with the HTML5 idea within the budget - do you have any ideas?

------
sandGorgon
\- Integrate RDP 6.0 (Vista and up) support into rdesktop. It is the one thing
keeping a lot of us from using Linux exclusively (<http://goo.gl/1pm8>) This
ties in with the Federal Information Processing Standards
(<http://goo.gl/RKUD>) which will make rdesktop useless for U.S. government
mandated connectivity requirements.

\- Fix suspend/resume on Linux or work towards integrating TuxOnIce/Suspend2
in the mainline. At the very least, improve DSDT debugging tools, so that non-
geeks can help developers identify why suspend is not working on their
desktops. <http://goo.gl/oUzF>

\- Create a SVGALIB backend to Plymouth, so that nvidia/ATI cards dont have
shitty bootsplash (<http://goo.gl/1D52>)

\- Fix SIL-Graphite support in Pango so that Asiatic fonts (using smartfonts)
are better supported.

\- Fix upstart scripts for postgresql, php-cgi and a zillion other services
(migrate them from the old style - it really messes up having them in
different places.)

\- And of course, the long running IPV6 slowdown bug (<http://goo.gl/y0SN>)

------
tvon
Here's one I filed 5 years ago:

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gksu/+bug/24280>

Short version: any theme installed by the user (to ~/.themes) will not be
picked up when running admin apps (because they're run as root and thus look
in /root/.themes, but it's a UX issue all the same).

~~~
will_critchlow
Thanks for this idea - this was 3rd in the list at the specified time. It
looks like it's possible we will get to this one - but it seems like it is
somewhat tricky (since it's been around for ~5 years). Any devs out there
familiar with this part of the system who might be able to contribute a fix /
idea (given budget!)?

------
nwmcsween
Extend compcache <http://code.google.com/p/compcache/> to cache disk
reads/writes to a block device (SSD), use LRU or ARC. Look at cleancache
(2.6.37) and integrate from there. This will allow for compressed ARC/LRU
based caching similar to zfs's l2arc.

~~~
tropin
Do you know if compcache has finally been integrated in the kernel?

------
exs
When resizing a gnome-terminal window, refresh/rewrap text. This is how
Terminal.app under Mac OS X works, and I'd love to see this feature on Linux.

<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336238>

------
modality
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90268>

The long and short: changing the CSS of a parent element of a flash movie
causes the flash movie to reload.

------
d3b14n
Help to debug and release Debian Squeeze :)

~~~
utoku
so your list is <http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/other/testing.html> ?
That's about 270 bugs at the moment.

~~~
d3b14n
So there's plenty of room to choose, isn't? ;)

------
HaskellElephant
My top 4 list of GNOME/freedesktop bugs is as follows:

4\. nm-applet crashes a lot! 3\. Often, elevating privleges (sudo and the
like), runs the program as root, meaning that any files it makes belong to
root, and the home folder isn't used but the root folder. 2\. If several users
are on, only one of them will be able to run nm-applet. 1.Keyrings, aka. can a
design be a bug?

------
corin_
<http://bugs.php.net/52435>

~~~
cont4gious
not only is that filed in the wrong place, but by someone clearly not
understanding _what_ they're filing. you can't fix stupid.

~~~
corin_
I did link to it as a joke, I wasn't genuinely hoping someone would think
"let's fix that bug"...

------
binarysoul
the article links back to the hacker news submission, billing it as a "list of
bugs." I don't get it.

~~~
will_critchlow
I was hoping people could list bugs here to allow the community to vote on the
ones that should be fixed first...

Seemed an easy place to have the voting happen.

We need someone to get the ball rolling!

~~~
metachris
Not an uninteresting idea, but the $1k is just a tiny amount of money, eg.
just 10x $100. It would be really interesting to have a (long-lasting) service
around raising funds for open-source contributions and bugfixes and connecting
users and developers. This could even look like a kind of reverse-kickstarter,
where a number of people contribute money to a specific goal and only then
find a developer/designer/... via the service.

As a sidenote: I always am a bit skeptical when i see links to a HN thread
propagated in posts, primarily because it may bring too many new people here
in particular if the post gets picked up by major news outlets. Nothing wrong
with new users, but I think anyone interested in HN related topics learns of
this site sooner or later anyway. The rate of submissions/changes on the front
page has increased a lot during the last year and I'm a bit afraid where that
will lead to (unless PG starts updating / trying a couple of things with HN,
such as thresholds, categories, etc).

~~~
will_critchlow
Good feedback Chris. Thanks (and sorry if I bring too many newbies into the
gene pool).

You're right - in many ways $1k _is_ tiny, but I was hoping that there would
be a bunch of annoying bugs / bugs in boring areas that cause people headaches
that (other) people could fix in ~1 hour or so.

If others wanted to chip money into the pot, I'd happily give it a shot at
administrating it for a bit and see if it gets traction. So far, we aren't
seeing bugs submitted that would cost > $1k to fix either - if we do, perhaps
we can persuade some people to chip in to help meet the cost...?

~~~
PilotPirx
Maybe you don't need money.

Could be enough to set up a website with accounts and a system that gives you
"karma" for each bug you remove or a feature you add. Amount of karma
depending on the bug/feature and maybe an additional voting system for users
to push their favourite feature or most annoying bug.

Having a lot of karma on such a site may even be interesting for your resume
when you apply for a job.

------
will_critchlow
Maybe there aren't any...?

Anyone going to get us going with a bug you'd like to see fixed in an open
source project?

------
TamDenholm
This isnt an open source bug as such but ive recently noticed that the web
version of rastorbator is down[1] and would like to see it up again or if
someone could provide a mirror. I know there is an open source version of
it[2] but i'd still like to see a web version up somewhere.

[1] <http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/>

[2] <http://code.google.com/p/rasterbator-ng/>

