43 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
43 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
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# random bug reports
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_In FOSS America, you don't find bugs, bugs find you._
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These are bugs that I stumble across, as one does, in the course of doing
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other things. As such, they are always a surprise and, usually, an
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annoyance. But, my stack can only get so deep, so to drop everything and
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try to document and report the bug to the right people in the right way is,
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to be honest, too much of a hassle for a lot of bugs that are more easily
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worked around or accomodated. Other times, there's nothing I'd like better
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to do than to go haring off after the bug, but I don't feel I can spend the
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time, because I already *had* a task I was supposed to be doing.
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A lot of the bugs I meet which I feel I can address are pretty simple:
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Broken links or misspellings or grammar errors or other typos, or they're
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wishlist items. So, in a lot of ways, these are harder bugs to deal with
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right off the bat because, unlike code, documentation and web sites often do
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not have source repositories or bug trackers set up, or, at least, that are
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as easy to find and navigate.
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The first step of reporting a bug is to document it. Write down what
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happens. (Or, if this is how you work, or more appropriate to the task in
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some other way, to screenshot it, or to record video or whatever. Get a
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record, at any rate.)
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So, my first impulse is to reach for my text editor. That's where this
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repository comes in. I'm already used to checking in text changes and
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pushing them up to a public place, why not do this for my bug write ups?
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This way, if the bug reporting mechanism is the "send an email" and I've
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already pushed a short write-up of the bug to this repository, I can just
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send a link!
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If there is a more structured bug-reporting mechanism, at least I'll have
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some of the details in hand wherever and whenever I am procrastinating hard
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enough that sending the report in seems to be an attractive way to spend the
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time.
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So, we'll see how this goes. Maybe if it works out, and I end up reporting
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these bugs and they get fixed, or they get fixed some other way, I'll be
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able to `git mv some-bug fixed/`
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