[OpenIndiana-discuss] found bug in time slider

[Jan Owoc]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 8:02 AM, openindiana <openindiana at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>> From: Jan Owoc [mailto:jsowoc at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 11:50 PM
>>
>> > Where is a good place to report this bug?
>>
>> The issue tracker is:
>> https://www.illumos.org/projects/openindiana/issues
>
> So, this is a common problem with a lot of open source projects.  In order to report a bug, you have to reproduce it, go to the website, create an account, with email verification, and in this case, ssh keys for some reason...

I agree that it is an annoyance. I have over a dozen accounts on
random trackers most of which I've used once. The usual rationale is
that we need a way to contact you if we have further questions.


> Most people wouldn't have bothered, but I actually reformatted my system in order to reproduce the bug.  I'm not going to register on the bug tracker...  But here are my notes, just in case anybody will enter it, who will bother with the effort:

The way most free software projects work is that there is a limited
number of volunteers with a limited amount of time. If you describe a
bug without a step-by-step way of reproducing it, one of said
volunteers may waste an hour or two trying to reproduce the bug.

Alternatively, since you've sent a detailed step-by-step analysis to a
public mailing list, anyone with an account could create the bug
report, pasting your text. I probably should have linked to this
discussion in the bug report:

https://www.illumos.org/issues/3072


>     Now try launching Time Slider again.  Magically it works.  That is a bug, my friends.

Thank you for your time. With free software projects, you can choose
between paying money for support (I'm sure there are people on this
list who, for a fee, could find and fix you bug), or contributing some
time and getting a solution for free. If you want a solution faster,
then I suggest trying what Jim suggested and posting the result:
http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2012-August/009016.html

Cheers,
Jan