Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: How to handle regressions

Hi Tanstaafl,

On Thu, 2014-10-02 at 15:23 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote:
> > You call the bug in question a major regression, and forget that the
> > people providing quality assurance are indeed volunteers. They either
> > catch a regression, or they don't.
>
> Yes, but ...
>
> a) surely you aren't denying the fact that many - most? - of the
> Libreoffice *developers* - especially ones working on core functionality
> - are actually *paid* coders, are you?

        Sure - some small but growing fraction of individuals working on
LibreOffice are paid; that small fraction produce around 2/3rds of total
commits. They are paid BTW not to fix random users' bugs - but to
support the customers of RedHat, Collabora, SUSE, Canonical, CloudOn,
Igalia, etc.

        I suspect there is some mis-communication here that there is some
money-fairy around TDF that pays people full-time to fix random
end-users' issues =) Particularly end-users with customers paying them
to provide fixes / support for their issues - when they are depending on
getting that out of 'the community'.

> <sigh> Inability to cut/copy/paste from/into fields is a *major*
> regression - for anyone who uses them.

        Sure - but, hey - it works for me; I have here a writer document
(loaded from a .doc) with fields in it and I copy / paste into it and
-it-just-works- (I have a 4.2 based build). So - I'm not sure that this
bug is quite as debilitating as suggested; there are several different
types of fields etc.

> Do you not see this? Is this not so obvious as to almost knock your head
> off?

        Developers do test their features. We ask and encourage our users to do
the same, and to file bugs.

> A month later the OP asked if the 4.3 series would be patched or if we
> would have to wait until 4.4, and he was rudely (imnsho) told by Joel to
> 'feel free to submit a patch', which happens far too often.

        So - of course, QA are welcome to prioritize the bug as they see fit.
And whomever implemented the fix is welcome to submit it to whatever
versions they think it is important to go to. Sometimes we get that
wrong - and of course people can indeed jump in and help to get their
patch merged to another branch if they want it there.

> No one said they were (or this one was) - but it is also plainly evident
> that the developer who pushed this code into production didn't even do
> minimal testing.

        I havn't read the bug; but there are a truck-load of assumptions behind
what you say that are way too numerous to even address here. Of course
developers test their changes, but there are lots of things that can
subsequently change underneath them that void assumptions that have been
made elsewhere.

        Incidentally - what I -least- like about this is the commercial side of
it; its fair enough to make a mistake in the priority of a bug, or
forget to back-port some fix to somewhere. But there is a -serious-
moral hazard problem if we start to have lots of aggressive arm-twisting
on the users lists around specific bugs for other people's customers
that I'd like to avoid.

        Anyhow - I hope that helps; it looks like for better or worse we got
the underlying issue resolved.

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@collabora.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot


-- 
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted