random bug reports

In FOSS America, you don't find bugs, bugs find you.

These are bugs that I stumble across, as one does, in the course of doing other things. As such, they are always a surprise and, usually, an annoyance. But, my stack can only get so deep, so to drop everything and try to document and report the bug to the right people in the right way is, to be honest, too much of a hassle for a lot of bugs that are more easily worked around or accomodated. Other times, there's nothing I'd like better to do than to go haring off after the bug, but I don't feel I can spend the time, because I already had a task I was supposed to be doing.

A lot of the bugs I meet which I feel I can address are pretty simple: Broken links or misspellings or grammar errors or other typos, or they're wishlist items. So, in a lot of ways, these are harder bugs to deal with right off the bat because, unlike code, documentation and web sites often do not have source repositories or bug trackers set up, or, at least, that are as easy to find and navigate.

The first step of reporting a bug is to document it. Write down what happens. (Or, if this is how you work, or more appropriate to the task in some other way, to screenshot it, or to record video or whatever. Get a record, at any rate.)

So, my first impulse is to reach for my text editor. That's where this repository comes in. I'm already used to checking in text changes and pushing them up to a public place, why not do this for my bug write ups?

This way, if the bug reporting mechanism is the "send an email" and I've already pushed a short write-up of the bug to this repository, I can just send a link!

If there is a more structured bug-reporting mechanism, at least I'll have some of the details in hand wherever and whenever I am procrastinating hard enough that sending the report in seems to be an attractive way to spend the time.

So, we'll see how this goes. Maybe if it works out, and I end up reporting these bugs and they get fixed, or they get fixed some other way, I'll be able to git mv some-bug fixed/