Why do I even bother, part 32767.
Tags: computers, linux
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This, basically, is why I hate Open Source projects. Of course, I hate paying bloated prices for bloated commercial software, for which I have to pay for more hardware upgrades to run as well.
Which, basically, is why I hate computers.
probably end up doing this too
Dude, don't you know? It's open source. That means you aren't supposed to file bug reports, you're supposed to look at the source, fix it, and resubmit it for them!
... and then they get to laugh at your patches and reject them!
A one-line patch in PostgreSQL's to_char() formatter for the comically obscure function of converting numbers into Roman Numerals; a break was quite obviously misplaced in a switch statement skipping an important part of the format block (the part that copied the result into the right area of memory).
Apparently the one-line patch was too difficult to review: they had one of their own guys investigate the bug.
At the very least, I got a good chuckle...
Sounds like he needs a good kick to the dome..
...the fuck!?
No, really, what the fucking fuck!?
They had a lot of nerve calling you rude and then flaming you for not being glued to the download page for the last two weeks.
At least you got a reply to your bug report, though. I never heard a word.
Oh man. I needed that laugh.
Send them a patch.
Like maybe a tire patch, for their arrogant droollpit?
You think they are being rude because they lost their eye patch?
Arr!
Are these people really this rude generally? Or is it some kind of inside joke that I don't know about.
Over-compensation for being replaceable by a dozen Indians, perhaps?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Gnome, where people are idiots and fairies wander the streets.
It's the globally recognized "be rude to Jamie Zaminski and see what fun words he cooks up in response"-joke of all open source developers in the world.
I'm appalled that nobody here has catched on to this yet.
I mean, all the open source developers have.
They're just jealous they don't have fan boys too.
I kid you not, number one question I hear when programmer types find out I know jamie "so why does he have so many fan boys anyway?" This is usally delievered in nasty tone of voice and wth a sneer and I realize that it's time to run. Unfortunately it's also sometimes followed by a list of why jamie is not cool before I've made my escape. Fortunately not everyone asks that.
My other favorite is the fan boy who decides it would be reallly cool to hang out with me because of my association with jamie. That's just gross.
It's undoubtedly redundant to say so, but -- eeew!
Strange. I used to work for the same company as Sven and met him quite a few times, and he's always come across to me as a nice guy; but I think he's making a mistake here. On the other hand it would be interesting to know if other strategies than escalating rudeness were more effective with dealing with strange attitudes from open source developers.
It's odd that people see this as a problem with open source; on my planet, closed-source software mostly sucks *even* *worse* - the chances of rudeness are lower, but so by far are the chances of helpfulness, and timewasting is far more likely.
The last comment to the bug seems to be the most helpful. You'd think the first guy could've just said, "We've resolved a number of memory leaks since that version. Try the latest development release and see if it reoccurs?"
But why provide information when there's an opportunity to blame the user?
Ok, so most of the guys are cocks but the last guy was helpful.
I have the same problem with The GIMP, using nearly the same camera that you have.
I haven't seen it fixed in debian yet, but I haven't tried the new CVS because I don't have a fast CPU (read: Cruslow) to compile with.
So short of buying a new Mac to run photoshop on, are you going to try the only non-cock-head guys suggestion?
Fwiw, <lj user=jwz> doesn't need any help solving computer problems, nor does any other competent hacker. The point here was the (in)human element.
jwz doesn't need any help solving computer problems
:)
Wait! Wait!
You mean that the last stable version has the bug too? Ooh! Ooh! Submit a report! I want to see them tell you to download HEAD!
Then, when that has the bug, submit a report! That way we can all watch them tell you that they won't fix it! After all, it's not anywhere near 2.2 yet.
While you're at it, submit a report and a patch to the mozilla guys that fixes their window~class problem on X. We can watch that float off in to neverland before our very eyes!
I get the impression that the problem with the various multi-year-old X-related Mozilla bugs (many of which I've reported) is that there's nobody working on the project (with the possible exception of Blizzard) who knows anything about Xlib. There are lots of people who know Gtk, but anything lower level than that is deep dark voodoo to most developers, even most Unix developers.
It's getting to be like finding someone who can actually write a program in PostScript. Lost knowledge of the ancients.
amen.
Think I'll second this. I've seen a lot of much better worded replies to the same value of "Can you try the latest CVS version and see if the bug still exists?"
From OpenBSD devs, no less (although this is a rarity).
Although from the flow of the text, it looks too much like they were making a special case out of the bug reporter...
32767. That's a good one. I should remember that.
So are all programmers such utter cocks?
The industry term we prefer is "void pointers".
yet another reason why gimp will never seriously compete with photoshop.
Havent they ever heard of automated profiling and debugging?
I'm a big fan of Insure++.
It would soil their open-source purity.
Profiled code never goes out to customers. So it wouldnt contain any closed source code linked in.
But I see what you're saying. They just dont like the idea of paying for it. Someone should work out a deal with the companies that produce automated code testing tools to get some licences donated to "open source QA groups" who could provide advertising for these companies products by publicly endorsing them.
I bet you anything netscape uses these tools on their software. And just look at how much more popular firefox is on windows than GIMP is. Big corporations who can afford commercial software tools have a definite edge.
As microsoft proves, QA is sorely lacking in most companies. Open source should be setting the example, not out-sucking microsoft.
Yep, you got it. I have had run-ins with people who refuse to use any non-free tools whatsoever, even when they sorely need them. I have no idea if that's the case here or not, I just like making sarcastic comments.
And I'm in total agreement with you. A friend of mine worked in QA for Adobe for a couple of years, and I seem to recall that, at least on the projects he was working on, memory & performance profiling was a mandatory part of their QA process.
All young programmers would do well to take their first job in the QA department of a software company.
it would seem to me, that they would give up and never move to become a developer
Seems to me that they would be inspired to move on to development.
"Look how low the bar is! I can sleep half the day and still do better than that!"
And this is why I'm such a bitter technical writer. I've been on so many projects over the years where it would've taken less time to rewrite the GUI code than to document it...
And that's a bad thing exactly why? :)
hehe, at least they replied. I still have a bug report open for xfree86 where x crashes anytime one attempts to run anything gl related (i.e. glxinfo / glxgears, etc). After aprox. 1 month of waiting for at least a 'this is a known issue, you suck read the documentation' or similar, i switched over to xorg, which amazingly the problem disappeared.
and amazingly with some cvs drivers for dri, dri worked too- which it didnt under xfree86.
anyways, yea i like gimp but ive noticied that gimp 2.2 is quite a bit more sluggish than the 2.0 series.
And, seeing as 'jwz' is nearly a house-hold name in the geek community, youd think they would at least add a little more respect to their replies.
One has to wonder if it is a result of you being you that you got that reply, or does he treat everyone like that?
perhaps you just have another person who is upset about rude/obscene screensavers that are not fit for
academiaworkLOL, its screensaverism! Fucking bigots!
Yeah, seriously, when I read that I was SHOCKED that someone would treat jwz like he didn't know how to debug.
I knew who he was ever since netscape put up an employee web page directory. What was that? A century ago? What hole have these people been hiding in all this time?
which bug, out of curiosity? i expect it's fixed by now but i like to make sure.
eh i just looked through bugzilla.xfree86.org and cant find it, it was with igp radeon mobility cards / xfree 4.4 / linux 2.6 the submiter should be like justin f or jnf or something along those lines, its only been a month or two since i submitted it, just never got a reply.
On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was me doing something wrong. I originally was using the generic vesa drivers which naturally didnt support dri for my card, when i realized i had it configured like this i changed it and poof the problem started.
On a sidenote, if you are using an igp radeon card and finding that dri doesnt work, get the cvs drivers and it (should) work fine.
found it. relevant line from your X log:
(WW) RADEON(0): Mismatched FB location. Incorrect version of DRM kernel driver is used.
now you know. also, IGP support has been merged to Xorg, it'll be in the next release.
i'll stop abusing this thread now.
ah important thing to note was that it crashed even if drm/dri wasnt loaded.
oh well, it all works now.
ty though
I think it's reasonable to expect that people know that "development" releases are mainly for use by developers, and are expected to have many bugs. And if you're using development releases to do real work, you're not going to get much help unless you basically dive in and debug most of the problem yourself. Yes, including downloading the latest release of five seconds ago and testing it.
I fail to see anything remarkable about this. You didn't think when you started using the .0 version of a development track of an open source project that you might end up here?
Totally unrelated: The First Avenue Massacre
He wasnt asking for help, he was contributing useful information to the developers. They rejected it out of hand, without even checking into the problem.
Like, if you dropped $20 on the ground, and I picked it up and handed it to you, and you said "fuck you, I dont want it", that would be analagous to this situation.
"Useful" gets defined by the developers. If they don't find it useful, then it's not. Too bad.
If I want to rid myself of the corrupting effect of American currency... who are you to complain?
True, but its still rude.
Agreed, rude = bad.
Tune in next week, for our championship bout, featuring Larry McVoy and Theo de Raadt.
Celebrity deathmatch? I'm betting on Theo. :)
Get him to tell Larry Wall that Perl isn't readable by humans, even ones that are programmers.
I think you confused Larry Wall and Larry McVoy here.
Larry Wall = Father of Perl, Weird Al look-a-like and overall nice guy.
Larry McVoy = Inventor of BitKeeper (aka ButtKreeper) and general lkml troll (think RMS, but from the opposite direction).
...or "fuck you, this $20 bill wasn't printed within the last two weeks."
really more like finding a driver's liscence on the ground, returning it and getting a "Fuck you, I dropped that two weeks ago, I've got a new one now."
it's akin, also, to getting flicked off by the person who just cut you off in their Canyonero XL.. I've never understood that. sometimes it happens without a precipitating honk, either..
The problem is that open-source projects hate to actually release. I regularly see stuff where the last official release was a year ago, but they have a beta that's a week old and has a ton more features. They don't use the official releases, why should I?
I, for one, welcome our new rude opensource developer overlords...
yeah, damn those pesky gimp developers for making such stable releases and fixing bugs so quickly. damn them to hell.
seriously, if you're going to report a bug in a development tree of something, you have to expect to rebuild it frequently. It doesn't really do much good to report it in one that's a month outdated. It's not like you have to reboot your computer to use a new version, and it's not that big of a deal to check the FTP site for a new version.
If you had reported a bug in a development version of the Linux kernel that was a month old, it'd probably be ignored.
While I entirely understand your point, can you see how being a Dickhead (TM) isn't helping anything?
I haven't known the gimp developers to be dickheads, generally. It doesn't look like this was any different, someone just didn't like the answer sven gave.
So you're judging them to generally act this way and you think they aren't being dickheads?
Alright. I admit it's subjective, you don't think they are being rude. Do you think they are being consistant? It seems that you do when you say that this is how they normally act.
If that's the case, it seems that the majority of the people involved in this discussion would agree, they are acting rudely now and thus, they are being dickheads.
Just because some people are totally cool with being callous doesn't mean that it's not a dickhead/rude thing to do.
I suppose it's just a matter of productive and constructive bug submitting. If those people were nicer, I bet they would have gotten what they wanted, jwz would have gotten what he wanted and everyone would be better off.
I think that the egos having a battle here should relax and perhaps both learn to get along socially.
If these conversations happened face to face, it would almost certainly not come to stupid shit fights like this. But then again, who knows?
I'm saying that they generally are not dickheads. Whether they were in this case would be subjective.
Do you ever have good experiences reporting bugs or interacting with open source people?
I realize that wouldn't make an interesting post, but considering the level of flaming you get for what seem to be reasonable requests, I'm curious if you ever get a reasonable answer in return.
Actually, my bug-reporting interactions with the Gimp folks have generally been above average (excluding the current example, of course.) In that, I report bugs, and often they get fixed. As opposed to Gnome in general, where I report bugs, and two years later they are closed because "all that code has been rewritten from scratch." Or X, where I report bugs, and they get closed because "fixing that would be difficult."
I can say with some authority that developers can be real assholes. This just reinforces my opinion that developers really, really shouldn't speak to customers.
Whoa. That's nasty.
Current Moz crew aren't any better tho.
Try talking to OpenBSD people for a bit...
They're utterly reasonable people as long as you don't talk about politics, religion, software or girls.
The plus side is that they actually do accept and apply patches, which is more than I can say for the mozilla people, the gnome people, Luigi Rizzo or countless others.
the moz people accept patches, but the "problem" is you almost need to take care yourself of your patch. Means getting reviews and super reviews, which isn't even easy since the official lists with reviewers are all out-of-date or the reviewers are overloaded with work.
Look, if the first answer was "yeah, probably a leak, we don't care about leaks in this version yet", I could totally accept that. But that's not what the answer was. The answer was "it's rude of you to have reported this bug at all, because that code is two weeks old." And that's just a totally ridiculous response. There was nothing rude about me reporting a bug; I was not asking for help, I was trying to help them.
What's the result of that kind of response going to be? I'm gonna stop reporting bugs, that's what, because why should I try and help someone who's just going to yell at me for it?
Developers are supposed to want people to report bugs. If you don't want non-developers to have access to a branch, don't link to it from your damned web site.
You are correct, he is wrong.
Ignoring the value of your bug report for a moment, we can think of it from a public relations standpoint. You go out of your way to help them with their project (best intentions, to be sure) and are rebuffed. Nowing this, will I ever submit a bug report to the gnome people? Of course not. I have better things to do than filling out bug reports to be yelled at. Even if they found your bug report unuseful, or maybe it had already been fixed or something, they should kindly thank you for taking the time to fill out the bug report, and to please do so again in the future.
To give credit where credit is due, one of the best bug-report related people I've dealt with has been Ryan "icculus" Gordon, who has done many video game ports. I've entered many bug reports and because he is always nice and genuinely helpful, I will continue to do so.
That's how I see it, anyway.
-cb
you're obviously an idiot lamer who doesn't know anything about software development, and is just using OSS cause it's cool. go back to Windoze.
. . . . . . . .
haha. It's been ages since I've seen the word "lamer".
Do not taunt jwz, he will hzXXor j00!
yeah. i'm like, old skool, n'stuff.
Besides the puzzling choice of "rude behaviour", I'm not sure Sven's reply was that big a deal. Of course, he could have added a note about the stuff mentioned later and then all would have been good. Maybe he read your bug report following a dozen useless ones had just worn his patience thin?
At any rate, while unhelpful, his reaction doesn't seem to justify making that big a deal out of it. Schumacher's reply admittedly is completely superfluous, but then, I'm not sure your retort to Sven to which Schumacher is replying sets a shining example either.