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

["Jim C. Brown" <jma5@umd.edu>]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 12:14:05PM -0500, jeebs@yango.us wrote:
> Not all of us are developers.
> 
> The best that many can do is test qemu and report problems when they are 
> found.
> 
> Some of us do a bit more, by deliberately testing qemu with lots of 
> software, looking for bugs.  And reporting bugs when they are found.

If you really want a bug to be fixed badly, and you have no idea of how to fix
it, what you need to do is contact the developer of that code and let that
person know about the bug.

E.g. I'm the developer of the gtk2 interface for qemu, and I have no idea about
what bugs it may have as no one has reported any to me. In fact, I have no idea
if anyone is even using it because I get no direct feedback. This is especially
true for using the gtk2 interface under Windows, because I am unable to test
the code there. If someone who could test it did, and told me about the bug,
I'd fix it right away.

The only problem with this approach is that the section of code you are interested
in having fixed may not have an active developer (person left a while ago or
it was a section written by Fabrice himself that he doesn't have time to go
over anymore). In that case, there isn't much you can do. Documenting bugs is
still good because a) we can let other users know its a known bug and b) when
a new maintainer for that section of code comes along, they'll be able to get
started on the fixes right away. But this is only satisfactory if you are a very
patient person.

> 
> 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.
> 

No one looks at the Savanah bug tracker because its never been used. If you were
to say submit every unfixed bug you found there, just maybe those of us who
bother to look every once in a while will see it and fix it.

Do this often enough and others will use it, etc... the qemu user forum and
the qemu irc channel developed in much the same way.

-- 
Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.