Re: [Qemu-devel] Norton Ghost crashes with page fault for me too.

[<jeebs@yango.us>]

From: "Henrik Nordstrom"


>> The best that many can do is test qemu and report problems when they are
>> found.
>
> Then you have to accept that the developers do the best they can in their 
> interest for the benefit of all.

Generally, the way open source works is that a bug that directly effects a 
developer, gets fixed.  They get annoyed enough they stop what they are 
doing and fix it.

A bug that directly effects code they have written, might get checked into.

If it's a bug they can live with or work around, it doesn't get fixed.  And 
probably not reported, for that matter.

If it's a bug that effects an OS that they don't use, it gets ignored. 
(Hence, the Windows builds were broken for a long time and nobody noticed it 
or if they did notice, didn't bother to fix it.)


>> But that's no excuse for bug reports to just vanish into the void. 
>> Without
>> an awknowledgement or somebody writting it down as a bug in qemu that 
>> needs
>> to get fixed eventually.
>
> There rarely is a void these days. If you send a bug report to a public 
> mailinglist then it

That makes the very very large assumption that the developers deliberately 
go looking through the back message archives for bugs that haven't been 
fixed.

After a couple days, people just forget about reported bugs.


>   b) Other people later having the same problem quite likely finds it in 
> the archives and refers to it when reporting the same issue again if it 
> still isn't fixed.

Similar bugs can show up in different ways.

Even when a bug does show up repeatedly, and effects many people, doesn't 
mean anybody cares to look into it.

It just turns into one of those consistant bugs that everybody knows about 
but no longer think of as a bug.  It becomes a 'feature' or a 'quirk'. 
"It's just the way qemu does things" kind of mental shift.

The cd changing bugs are excellent examples.

They've been around for so long that most people in here no longer even 
think of them as bugs.  They are just simply quirks in qemu.  And because 
they are no longer 'bugs' but 'quirks', nobody even thinks to look into it.

Never mind whether they would find the bug or be able to fix it.  It's been 
around so long that they don't even *think* of it as a bug anymore, so they 
don't even *think* to look at it.

(I"m not saying the cd changing bugs are absolutely critical.  Yes, it does 
prevent some OS's from being installed!  But it doesn't crash qemu, etc.  It 
does show how a bug can stop being thought of as a bug.)

> So even if there is no official bugtracking tool (which depending on the 
> developer situation can be good or bad) the report isn't really lost.

Technically, yes, it does get archived.

But effectively it gets lost because it's no longer immediately visible as a 
bug.  You have to specifically go looking for bug reports through the 
archives.  And then go looking through the messages again to see if it's 
been fixed.  (Either partially or fully.)


Mailing lists can be very convenient.

But they also make it easy for things to get essentially lost.  If something 
isn't in a recent message, then your brain just tends to forget about it 
after a few days.