Writing a bug report
Writing a bug report is a hard thing to do. I know. Fortunately, there’s some easy rules to follow when you want to get it fixed and fast! To ease your understanding, I will illustrate them with some real-life examples:
- Scream. It’s so easy to write upper-case (thanks for caps lock!). And for most people, they’re much easier to read. They’re stupid anyway, so they’re probably used to being screamed at. So start with a nice “OH MY GOD. What went through your head when you did this?”, then go on explaining your problem: “gcc is FUCKING SLOW”.
- Annoy. If possible, mark the bug with highest priority and severity. You filed it, so you decide on how important it is for others! After you expounded your problems that verbosely, say something personal. This helps: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
- Show that you’re annoyed. There’s quite some ways to do that. Use your fantasy, remember how you did that when you were a child. “Even Apple and Microsoft would be ashamed of fucking up this badly.” or “What a great distro you have there. Debian would be proud of you.”
- When people ask questions, insult them. Really, they shouldn’t try to reproduce the bug anyway. Why would they want to have the bug themselves, instead of just fixing it! “I’ll give you personally ten bucks if this helps you debug the issue. … I dare you to tell me how the emerge –info helps you. Do it publicly, please, so the humiliation is greater. “
- Threaten. If not everyone will know how important your bug is to you until here, you should make that clear again: “But apparently Gentoo is not interested in fixing bugs. … Don’t bother. I’ll switch distros.”
- Propose bad solutions. This is actually hard. You have to distinguish your solution from the way it is right now (”This whole construct is braindead.”) Remember not to ask or think about the reasons why it’s the way it is right now.
- Point fingers. “This is so unbelievable that I will blog about it, too.”
Sadly for the example, following these steps didn’t fix the bug. Another report did.
Exactly. Although this user seemed to be in the “funroll-loops.org” style of gentoo user. Some users are just going to be pissed because they had to do extra research (read forums, do some preliminary testing, stack traces, etc.) to scratch their issue. We’re well to be rid of users like these, let them go to other distros and harass them.
I think this is very exact:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040319h.jpg
It is even more hilarious because it is Felix von Leitner
this Felix:
http://bulk.fefe.de/
and this one:
http://www.fefe.de/
as the person behind a lot of software projects (like dietlibc) and an author who even wrote for c’t I would expect a much better behaviour. He made himself look very bad.
Ech! Miniscule gray-on-white text? Can you please make this blog easier to read?
Hahaha, the bug report is hilarious and the gentoo people answering it are morons and deserve to be insulted as much as possible.
I certainly understood the bug report and how to fix it, and the “solution” of addings some wierd directory to $PATH is ridiculous.
You just don’t appreciate the fun of insulting people too stupid to be aware of their own ignorance.
David, sorry for being hard on your eyes. I had a look at some themes and didn’t find any better yet :-/
jk, having actually looked at the code and the $PATH, I can say that the solution the reporter stated (putting a weird path in front of /usr/bin) is not the one ever taken.
You forgot to mention the post was from the dietlibc author
Not that I have anything against that. Seeing it signed as the author of dietlibc was similar to the moment in jurassic park when she says “This is UNIX, I know this!”
when linus or theo uses that writing style, others praise them as knowledgeable and assertive. you do get more results by being friendlier, but i’m sure this guy is in a position where he spent a considerable amount of time wondering why things were so slow, and then finally found out it was due to a braindead decision of putting a possibly long-running shell script wrapper instead of a simple symlink to choose which gcc to run.
There is also the other side; how to create a bug tracker:
1. Confuse – show dozens of cryptic options and selection the typical bug reporter can’t answer; “select component” – provide a long list of components to make sure the reporter fail. “priority” – the reporter have the big picture and should set the priority of the bug. “severity” – another opportunity to make it harder for the reporter. Yes, I’m pointing at you bugzilla
2. Make it hard to attach files – don’t let the reporter attach files on the same form – that will be too easy, and we would like to waste his time. Make it fill another form to attach a file, and use multiple description fields to make him describe the same thing multiple times.
3. Ignore bug reports. If the reporter want someone to look at the bug, let him manually find the owner of the broken code, and add the owner email to the cc box.
4. Use multiple registration systems; I the user is registered on your wiki, require another login for the bug tracker. We worked hard on that code; the user should work hard too. If possible, apply draconian security measures; force the user to replace his password each month; allow only alpha-numeric characters in the password.
rbu: Ah, that’s good to hear, so did they do the Right Thing ™?
It’s funny, isn’t it? Being direct and blunt about rank stupidity when you find it is somehow a terrible thing to do, but snide passive-aggressive bitching behind that person’s back is somehow OK?
Robert, the moral high ground is all the way up there, and the stream down here is starting to soak through your shoes.
Sometimes users come with really incredible ideas. And the worst is that they demand these ideas be implemented right away!
The only problem I see with the original bug report is the total lack of humor by the gentoo devs. They are taking themselves way too serious. The report was over the top and hysterical by design, and it should have been taken lightly, maybe even answered in similar style.
And then the bug should have been fixed, because it WAS totally braindead.
All these years, I thought gcc being fucking slow was a feature, not a bug.
friend has given the link has not regretted that has come