Varied Reactions

Strong feelings are being expressed…

You, sir, have no business being in charge of making bug prioritization
decisions, bemused dolt that you are. Deciding to close bugs because the
Bugzilla reports aren’t being updated is the choice of a fool who has no
concept how robust code is created and maintained, a beancounter
mentality choice, not a software developer choice. That you have
made this choice despite the protests of wiser heads working on
Mozilla code show that you are not merely a fool, but an invincibly
ignorant one, so sure of yourself when in error that you cannot
even heed wise counsel.

Such persons are best removed posthaste from the gene pool, as a danger to all and everything around them.

vs.

Allow me to repeat and to underline that I support very much this initiative/measure/feature of robo-resolving 12,342 inactive unconfirmed bugs. This feature includes a 2 week grace period: that is a sane, sound and absolutely fair period of time.

I am 100% convinced that such measure will do overwhelmingly more good (much more good) than do bad. The balance of benefits versus inconvenients and implied trade-off in this feature will bring a lot of fresh air into a deeply rotten mass of bugreports which no longer made any sense.

Again, you have my unconditional one thousand percent (1000%) support in this initiative.

8 thoughts on “Varied Reactions

  1. I’m not going to spam the bug with a comment, but in case Kent ever visits here I figured I’d respond out of amusement at his lack of comprehension.

    ***

    Kent: you have impressive credentials. I, too, work for a company which produces safety-critical software upon which lives depend and in which the number of bugs must be 0. There aren’t too many of us around.

    As a software developer for many years, then, surely you know the amount of care and effort needed to design and build such a product. This is far beyond the efforts put into “normal” software. Such effort does not come cheaply; that is why safety-critical and secure products cost significant money to buy, and contracted work on them has a price. That money pays the costs of the engineering time needed to prevent, or if necessary fix, bugs. Depending on the level of assurance required, such software might cost up to ten times as much per line of code when compared to non-critical software (which itself is not free).

    If presented with a contract requiring the supplier to provide certified safety-critical code at no cost, surely any supplier would laugh and reject the offer. Yet this is exactly what you are asking the Mozilla Foundation to do. You lambast their attitude which you find insufficiently stringent, yet make no provision (and seem to have no conception) of the corresponding resource cost you’re suggesting they incur.

    Where do you propose the money and manpower to fix your bug, and all others in the codebase, is going to come from? For surely if you wish to see the bug fixed someone must be available to fix it. But in a product with far more work to be done than engineers to work on it, the “safety-critical” path is not an option. Mozilla’s products are not, and do not claim to be, bug-free. However, Mozilla Foundation management can choose to do its best to reduce the likelihood that users will encounter a bug or be damaged by it. The automatic resolution of unconfirmed bugs is a way to try to prompt reporters to pitch in and help the QA team by triaging real bugs — not a way to “get rid of” bugs that someone doesn’t wish to work on. This seems like a good way to help a small number of employees work on the problems that are most affecting the product’s users.

    I’m sure that, given an appropriate amount of money or volunteer labor, everyone involved would love to see EVERY bug in the product fixed. As long as that is not forthcoming, I fail to see how your statements will result in a product that is actually better for the body of users as a whole, compared to the actions being taken currently. In your case, since neither you nor, apparently, anyone else have reproduced the bug since your initial filing, it seems plausible that something other than a Mozilla bug may have caused the problem. In any case, by the 80/20 rule, it is almost certainly the case that more users will be helped by engineers working on another bug besides yours.

    Incidentally, for what it’s worth, there was a comment in your bug by a developer which began to directly address the issue you reported: the codebase should prevent a modal dialog from being hidden under another window. However, before anyone else had looked into the specific issue of whether and how this could actually happen, you felt the need to contribute a long-winded rant on the evils of modal dialogs, which did not actually enlighten anyone as to the actual cause in the Mozilla codebase of the problem you saw. I suggest that in the future you consider that such comments may be counter-productive.

  2. The interesting thing about the first comment is that he made different comments in other bugs in the same vein as his first.

    Unco bugs that have been commented on after Gerv’s automatic notice http://tinyurl.com/8qzo2 There are a number of people who replied that the bugs were still present in 1.0.x, 1.7.x, or no mention of a build at all. These need to be checked with a current build. It also seems that there are a number of requests for enhancement bugs it would be good to wontfix/new those bugs.

  3. The funny thing is that both views are right. Maybe change the vs to ‘and also’, too many crufty bugs = bad, a few bugs with very intellignet eyes on them = good.

    anyhoo, good work guys. thanks for a beautiful browser. but please hurry up with the 3D stuff ;-) I want to run around my website Quake styleeee.

    monk.e.boy

  4. Meh. He’s a dolt. Bugzilla is for people, not code. It’s where people track code changes and issues, not where code tracks people. Anything to make Bugzilla more useful to people is the obviously correct choice. Just like how the computer’s job is to make your life easier, not the reverse.

  5. At first I thought it was funny, but now that I’ve read the background on this strange man, I’ve no doubt it’s not. It’s quite scary, actually. It’s what keeps the public up at night about the internet.