10 Year Old KDE Bug Finally Gets Fixed

[Ovocean]

The Free software community needs a way to gather to pay developers for fixing bugs and developing features that no one is willing to fix/develop on their free time.
We need a crowdfunding platform specialized in this! I believe it would greatly help the libre ecosystem as whole and offer payed job opportunities for libre software devs.

I don't have the skills nor the time for this these days, only to spread the idea. Hopefully it gets picked up by someone.

[Elv13]

Today, I had a problem with Marble. Did I report the bug right away? No. I went to IRC, talked about it, then made a bug and guess what: it is fixed. I always do that and most of the time, it get fixed right away*. It work for most software I use, not only KDE ones. I reported some very serious bugs in other (mostly GTK apps, as I don't often IRC with them) and it took years to get a fix. If you don't push a bug upward in their priority list, it usually wont get fixed.

That said, it sometime work. I usually fix bugs reported to me on a mailing list withing a week or 2 and on the tracker in less than 2 months. 2 years ago, I also tried to report a crash a day to help Calligra get better (for the sake of doing some QA) and to my suprise, only one stayed open most then 24 hours. So it always come down to the project and the people maintaining it. It also come down to the size of the codebase. Fixing a bug in a 20k line project is simple as the whole code can fit in our head, if the design is clean, you don't even have to open a computer to have a clear idea of the problem. However, it is impossible for bigger apps or libraries.

*I am a dev too, but I usually consider diving in other projects rather inefficient and do it only if I really care

[Adaptee]

I've stopped reporting bugs to kde after years of totally unsuccessful reporting to bugs.kde.org. All what i've seen was bugs pilling up on the bugzilla,

Not really. Visit https://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summ...ps=70&days=730 :

Total: 21026 bugs and 15778 wishes
44753 bugs opened, 48727 bugs closed in the last 730 days
(4993 wishes opened, 7107 wishes closed)

See, the total number of bugs & wishes are decreasing during the past 2 years. Sure, it always has the tendency of piling up, but the result is not always the same as you would have expected.

As comparison, visit https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?...0&products=100 :

Total Reports: 43412 (51445 reports opened and 50858 reports closed. Including enhancement requests)

a very lot of old duplicate,

That would be true for bug tracker of every big FOSS projects, because developers are always minorities compared with reporters, and often there are no dedicated QA people helping developers to take care of the bug tracker.

Also don't forget KDE makes it extremely easy for average users to report bugs: "Help -> Report Bugs" for normal bugs, DrKonqi for crashes. One side effect, though, is bugs.kde.org often receives bug reports that are of low quality from users who are not experienced in writing useful bug reports .

[halfmanhalfamazing]

KDE isn't supposed to know QA

Really cool, they fixed a bug that probably nobody noticed for 10 years, while there are billions of tickets in the bugtracker, lot of them confirmed and untouched for years. They can keep going releasing "Major" 4.x releases whose biggest feature is "fixing bugs" and "Minor" 4.x.y releases with lot of changes breaking things even more.
Come on KDE, do some %$%!!#% QA, show that you care at least a little bit for your users. I'd love to go back to KDE...

Did you notice why Thiago fixed this bug ? Not because it was breaking 10k people or was voted the most in bugzilla, but because HE was hit by the bug.

As open source users, we(you and I) are the QA team.

If you really want to see a bug fixed, here's what you do:

Verify the bug in multiple distros, and file the bug with multiple distros' bugzillas. Particularly those with either A) fantastic programming talent, or B) Large money bags behind them.(By this I mean, but not limited to distros like Gentoo and Fedora)

Especially if you can get the bug to pop off one of the automatic bug reporting tools like Fedora's ABRT or Ubuntu's Apport.

This is how I got rid of a few bugs that were bugging me.

Do you want to complain? Or do you want the problem solved?

[orzel]

It seems to me that you're not a hobbyist open source developer.

I guess this can always be debatable ("what you do is crap"), but I actually do consider myself an OS dev. I was even once very close to KDE (I only commited few patches that I'm not especially proud of so i wont say 'contributing').

But I do work on several other projects, and I do consider that I kinda "owe" something to my users. Throwing some (ugly, untested) code on git is not what i consider "being an OS dev". It's just this.. throwing code. As an OS dev, i do consider that I should either listen to users, especially when they are dev carefully reporting bugs. Or if I can't I should say it clearly and publicly.

I've stopped reporting bugs to kde after years of totally unsuccessful reporting to bugs.kde.org. All what i've seen was bugs pilling up on the bugzilla, a very lot of old duplicate, and most importantly, developers basically denying the bug or arguing as you do ("this is opensource, so you dont have to cry"). Fortunately this was not often, but this oh-so... you know... not what i'm used to as a dev.

[Awesomeness]

Come on KDE, do some %$%!!#% QA, show that you care at least a little bit for your users.

In case of community software even QA has to be done by the community.

Some of us aren't coders. Some of us just want to use this stuff, and forgive me, but I don't see your attitude helping. I may not have submitted patches for software I've used, but I have reported bugs and tested patches that attempted to fix them.

No matter how many bug reports you filed or how many patches you tested, you are still not entitled to anything.

[Ericg]

Some of us aren't coders. Some of us just want to use this stuff, and forgive me, but I don't see your attitude helping. I may not have submitted patches for software I've used, but I have reported bugs and tested patches that attempted to fix them.
Speaking of things I'm thankful for, there are projects I use where bugs are fairly efficiently identified and fixed, and where the community is a little more helpful than that. If you want to hang on to users who are just that, "users", then some people might have to adjust their attitudes a little.

I'll apologize for my attitude only because i was in a pretty crappy mood when I read his post. And i'll grant you that just even reporting bugs and testing their possible fixes helps tremendously. It was just his attitude about which bugs were getting fixed that really bugged me.

[Redshirt001]

Welcome to open source, man, community doesnt OWE you shit. You scratch your own itches. Thiago fixed this bug because it was an impediment to an itch he wanted to scratch. If your own itch happens to be seeing the most voted bugs on bugzilla finally fixed..then maybe you should roll up your sleeves and start helping. Otherwise sit down, shutup, and just be thankful for what you do already have.


Signed
A-User-Who-HAS-Submitted-Patches-For-KDE-Bugs

Some of us aren't coders. Some of us just want to use this stuff, and forgive me, but I don't see your attitude helping. I may not have submitted patches for software I've used, but I have reported bugs and tested patches that attempted to fix them.
Speaking of things I'm thankful for, there are projects I use where bugs are fairly efficiently identified and fixed, and where the community is a little more helpful than that. If you want to hang on to users who are just that, "users", then some people might have to adjust their attitudes a little.

[Ericg]

Really cool, they fixed a bug that probably nobody noticed for 10 years, while there are billions of tickets in the bugtracker, lot of them confirmed and untouched for years. They can keep going releasing "Major" 4.x releases whose biggest feature is "fixing bugs" and "Minor" 4.x.y releases with lot of changes breaking things even more.
Come on KDE, do some %$%!!#% QA, show that you care at least a little bit for your users. I'd love to go back to KDE...

Did you notice why Thiago fixed this bug ? Not because it was breaking 10k people or was voted the most in bugzilla, but because HE was hit by the bug.

Welcome to open source, man, community doesnt OWE you shit. You scratch your own itches. Thiago fixed this bug because it was an impediment to an itch he wanted to scratch. If your own itch happens to be seeing the most voted bugs on bugzilla finally fixed..then maybe you should roll up your sleeves and start helping. Otherwise sit down, shutup, and just be thankful for what you do already have.


Signed
A-User-Who-HAS-Submitted-Patches-For-KDE-Bugs

[TheCycoONE]

Did you notice why Thiago fixed this bug ? Not because it was breaking 10k people or was voted the most in bugzilla, but because HE was hit by the bug.

It seems to me that you're not a hobbyist open source developer. Rather you seem like an entitled user that thinks that 'the community' exists to satisfy them. Stop and think for any piece of software you regularly use "if I was a developer on this project, which bugs would I fix?" Ignoring that some problems can be fixed in a couple hours, and some require extended periods of time and focus, I'm fairly confident that most of the bugs you would fix are ones you yourself or your friends/people you talk to encounter. Luckily there is probably a large overlap between bugs that affect you, and bugs that affect other users, but sometimes there isn't, and nagging is not motivating.

The other aspect of complexity is also important. If a user nags me I might spend a couple hours getting to the bottom of a problem and fixing it, but I probably won't ignore my family for a few weeks to do so unless those users are paying my salary.