Writing a bug report
August 26th, 2007
15 comments
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.