File bugs, don't fix 'em.

[Noah Kantrowitz]

On Jan 7, 2009, at 2:48 AM, John Gilmore wrote:

> genesee wrote:
>>> before the mesh search cycle is done, the 'looking for a mesh' keeps
>>> blinking forever while my wifi is solid. If I let the mesh search  
>>> run it's
>>> course, (while I'm doing something else ...it takes a few  
>>> minutes), then
>>> there's just my solid wifi circle in my frame.
>>
>> That sounds like a bug (the perpetual blinking).  Manual intervention
>> must be preventing some signal from getting through; we should
>> definitely fix that so the states of both devices are consistent.
>> File a ticket? :)  Thanks.
>>
>> - Eben
>
> Why would anyone bother to file a ticket about this?  One was filed
> *15 months* ago, reported "fixed" when it wasn't actually, reopened
> three months ago, and is still not fixed.  See
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4074 .  You yourself didn't look for an
> existing ticket before suggesting that this user, who was nice enough
> to help you debug your product, file yet another one.
>
> The same bug has likely been reported in #5459 (13 months ago), #6872
> (6 months ago), #6944 (8 months ago), and almost certainly more often
> (I got tired of wasting my time looking).  None of these bugs has been
> altered in any way in the last *THREE MONTHS*.  It's common knowledge
> among users that there's a bogus mesh icon that blinks sometimes.
> Everyone has learned to ignore it, including those responsible for
> fixing it.
>
> It seems to take special chivvying to get almost any bug report looked
> at by a developer.  (I've filed a lot of bugs and chivvied a lot of
> developers.)  It seems to me that in programmer culture, when there's
> nobody measuring progress by bugs actually fixed over the last week or
> month, generally bugs don't get fixed.  This was as true at Cygnus as
> at OLPC (the difference is that significant Cygnus revenue came from
> top-notch bug support, so mgmt paid a lot more attention to it; we
> wrote the first free software bug tracker, PRMS, for example).  Here's
> *everything* that happened in TRAC since before the New Year:
>
>  http://dev.laptop.org/timeline?from=01%2F07%2F09&daysback=8&ticket=on&milestone=on&wiki=on&update=Update

Funny, I don't see your name on there either.

--Noah