Unable to use Trac + bug report

Steve Litt slitt at troubleshooters.com
Fri Mar 15 08:53:34 UTC 2024


Carlos Pita said on Tue, 12 Mar 2024 19:27:40 -0300

>Hi,
>
>I tried to report a bug after 5 years of having used your bug tracker
>for the last time and I found that:

Bug trackers are where bug reports go to die. On a lot of projects I
tried using their bug tracker, and the bug never got addressed because
putting in the bug tracker is like sweeping it under the table.

Half of the 50 free softwares I use have bug trackers, and they're all
different. I'm expected to learn and remember 25 different bug tracker
interfaces. I can't accuse LyX of this because I never submitted a LyX
problem to a bug tracker.

Bug trackers ALWAYS ask questions that are n/a for the problem being
reported, and occasionally you find one that *demands* an answer before
letting you go on.

When I was the Vimoutliner maintainer, we fixed problems that came in
on the mailing list, right away. Either we helped the user get it right,
or if it was a bug we fixed it and released. Everyone was happy. The
point could be made that our application was rather simple, but a) We
had only two developers, both very part time, and b) Maybe that's the
point: If the software's too complicated to handle on the mailing list,
maybe it's just too complicated.

One time I put on the mailing list a way to make the first new
paragraph non-indented, the rest indented, in HTML, so in the HTML
export they didn't need to do that mickey-mouse technique of two
different paragraph styles, one for the first paragraph and the other
for the rest. By the way, my solution was about 5 lines of CSS. Did
anyone thank me? No. They said "put it on the bug tracker." I said "I'm
not familiar with the bug tracker, can one of you do it?" The response
I got was that I was a lazy free-rider.

Bug trackers really do suck.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21


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