Re: KDE and Gnome

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 10:03:49PM +0200 or thereabouts, Marcin Antczak wrote:
> W li??cie z ??ro, 27-08-2003, godz. 19:20, Mike Newman pisze: 
> > According to Bugzilla, you have filed 10 bugs - all between 23rd and
> > 27th August 2003. Five of these are already resolved duplicates, three
> > need more information and two remain unconfirmed. Pretty damn good turn
> > around by the Bug Squad there I think.
> 
> Well sorry but remaining bugs was in my out box so they will go in a
> while. I will try to fill bugzilla report for next bugs in my free time.

I don't quite follow here. Are you using the email interface to
Bugzilla? Most people use the web interface or go through bug-buddy.

> I don't get your sarcasm about resolved duplicates - I just don't have
> powerfull enough machine to compile fresh cvs gnome every day so it is
> natural that user reports bugs already resolved.

You're missing his point. It is good practice to search Bugzilla
before submitting a bug, in case it has been submitted already.
The infamous bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94625
is a case in point. That page takes a while to load and shows how
_many_ people were involved in sorting out hundreds of duplicates
into one bug. I (with some help, I note!) once reduced some
thousand-plus (truly) bugs to a group of 20 or so, one of which
had over _five hundred_ duplicates. 

It took me three days of doing _nothing_ but sorting that product
to do that. Full-time (no, I am not paid to work on Gnome either).

Because hundreds of people had considered it too much effort to
spend five minutes (assuming a crappy connection and no familiarity
with the bug tracker interface: it can be much faster) checking
for duplicates, I spent three very long days on it.

Btw, a resolution of "duplicate" means that someone has already submitted
the bug, not that someone has duplicated the bug on a recent build.
I think there is some confusion in your post about that.

> Well.. I really don't want to start a flame war or something... I just
> must say that Gnome 2.4 rc1 is just annoying.

"xxx is just annoying" with no simple clear analysis of what makes
you feel that way is an excellent way to start a flame war.

> User interface is a mess, but I'll try to compile new cvs version and
> see what's going on. I hope it will be better.

You don't need to compile the CVS version. You do need to search
Bugzilla before reporting a bug. Bug-buddy will actually show you
a list of the "top ten most reported bugs", to try to prevent
endless duplicates. It's a shame that people just click straight
on through it.

> I don't work as beta tester so in a _free_ time I will report this bug.
> BTW bug-buddy in my opinion is annoying too - why I can't report more
> than one bug at once? It rebuilds product list each time and it takes
> about a minute.... wrrr.

Because if you report a bug like this:

  "gnome-panel does this, which is wrong. epiphany does this, which
  is broken. galeon does this, which is silly. konqueror does this,
  which is odd. xchat does this, which is broken."

..someone has to go through and split that into five different
bugs, assign four of them to the correct products, components,
versions and releases of Gnome bugzilla, and then work out what
to do with the Konqueror bug which should go to KDE. That's a
lot of work, particularly because Bugzilla is not built to 
expect bugs to be split up. Essentially, they'd have to re-enter
each bug for you, add you to the cc list, and put up with getting
notified on every change to a bug that is yours, not theirs.

Rebuilding the product list each time, I am not sure about.
 
> And first I'll try why I have such scrappy sounds in my speakers
> probably gstreamer is broken I want to investigate first.

Scrappy sounds in the speakers on my machine were almost invariably
a sound driver or kernel problem. 

Telsa