Re: Behavior Trends in Nautilus and other Desktop Apps

[Karsten Bräckelmann <guenther rudersport de>]

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 01:08 -0500, Ben Liblit wrote:
> Karsten Br�elmann wrote:
> > Oh, I didn't expect you guys to actually have subscribed to the
> > [gnome-bugsquad] list, judging from the first post. I did, however,
> > hope it. :)

Hah, you did it again. :-)

I did *not* say bugsquad list (which I did not mention until close to
the end of the post), and I didn't mean to imply it either. I just said
"list", which in that context would be the current list we are having
this discussion on.  nautilus-list... :)


> When Jason and I looked at the <gnome-bugsquad> list archives, it seemed 
> that discussion there mostly concerns Bugzilla administration and policy 
> questions.  That's why we didn't send a copy of Jason's original message 
> to that list.  If you think there are a fair number of people on that 
> list who would be interested in what we're doing, though, we can 
> certainly join the list and try to get some discussion going.  Do you 
> think we should do that?

Maybe. Though it depends on your ultimate goals, I guess. For querying
bugzilla, the Bugmasters would be the right one to ask. However, no such
publicly accessibly list, IIRC.

Also, a lot of the development and internals are not discussed on
mailing lists, but IRC and even real life (GUADEC), since it is a rather
small core team...

Anyway, the bugsquad list probably is a good place to start and to get
in contact with them. I would suggest mentioning more technical details,
possibly ideas how to notify the relevant developers about your findings
and of course which findings and data exactly.


> > Anyway, I did NOT say what you quote out of context above.
> 
> Ah, you are right.  I never intended to put words in your mouth, and I 
> sincerely apologize for misrepresenting your comments.

No problem, dude, no offense taken.  I just meant to emphasis the fact I
did not say that...


> You are also right when you point out that bugginess is not the same as 
> crashiness.  One bug can cause many failures, and one bug in a library 
> (even a GTK+ theme) that Nautilus uses can cause Nautilus to fail 
> through no fault of its own.  Our findings affirm that Nautilus 2.14 on 
> Fedora Core 5 crashed often; they do not necessarily suggest that it had 
> more bugs.
> 
> I'll let Jason reply to some of the more technical points in your 
> message, but I do want to emphasize that (1) we are not just looking at 
> stacks, and (2) we do understand and exploit the distinction between 
> bugs and failing runs.  CBI is very much about finding the root causes 
> of the most common failures, with an explicit bias toward finding the 
> few bugs that cause the most problems for the most people.

Another point I suggest to clearly express. The original post on this
list unfortunately lacked this information. Hence my discussion about
bug vs crash...


> Thanks for your feedback, and again I am sorry for misquoting you earlier.

And this time... ;-)

  guenther


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0  ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}