When do regressions become high priority for developers? I ask because I opened bug 13583 over 14 months ago, provided all the information requested, as did other people, and nothing has happened. The program worked with Wine 0.9.53 but has been broken since then.
I have continued to test the program on newer versions of Wine occasionally, but the bug persists. In fact, I am starting to see more regressions in recent Wine builds that prevent me from getting to the point in the program where I can test the regression reported in the bug report.
14 months seems to be more than reasonable to repair a regression. I'm worried about having to forever maintain a separate installation of Wine just to use this program. I'll be happy to test further if someone is going to work on this bug but right now my efforts seem to be for naught. Should I bother to continue to give this bug any attention or just abandon it and focus my efforts elsewhere?
Matt
I can't speak for the rest of developers, but for me bugs become a priority if: * They are regressions caused by a patch that I wrote. * They are in an area that I know well (gdiplus, windowscodecs, explorer/appbar.c). * CodeWeavers, my employer, decides that they should.
There are only a few areas of the code that I know well. I can and often do work in other areas, but my progress is slower there.
Given that volunteer developers (including CodeWeavers) decide on their priorities in their own ways, it's quite possible (even likely) that there are bugs that should be important to the Wine project but are not important to any individual developer.
My personal priority are similar to Vincent's. If I cause a regression, I try to fix it
*) If its an easy fix, useful hints in the bug report etc, and my time permits *) Or if the fix is important to the one who pays my electricity bills(CodeWeavers) *) If the regression is a real regression because the patch had a flaw, and not because it happened to uncover existing other bugs(for example, I do NOT consider Bug 18401 a regression) *) If the regression happens in an area of code that is generally shaky and needs more attention to fix. In that case just trying to patch out the regression will cause new regressions - directly working on the big fix as time permits is usually better.
There are surely some exceptions to this etc and I guess I left some easier regressions I caused untouched because I simply lost track of them. Every now and then they get randomly fixed or someone else picks them up.
On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:46:19 -0700, you wrote:
14 months seems to be more than reasonable to repair a regression. I'm worried about having to forever maintain a separate installation of Wine just to use this program. I'll be happy to test further if someone is going to work on this bug but right now my efforts seem to be for naught. Should I bother to continue to give this bug any attention or just abandon it and focus my efforts elsewhere?
I have submitted a fix for this bug a minute ago.
To get the attention of some developers (at least for me) it helps to "ping" every now and then on bugzilla that you have tested yet again with the latest wine version and that it fails in the same way (or another way of course).
Rein.
Rein Klazes wrote:
On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:46:19 -0700, you wrote:
14 months seems to be more than reasonable to repair a regression. I'm worried about having to forever maintain a separate installation of Wine just to use this program. I'll be happy to test further if someone is going to work on this bug but right now my efforts seem to be for naught. Should I bother to continue to give this bug any attention or just abandon it and focus my efforts elsewhere?
I have submitted a fix for this bug a minute ago.
To get the attention of some developers (at least for me) it helps to "ping" every now and then on bugzilla that you have tested yet again with the latest wine version and that it fails in the same way (or another way of course).
Rein.
This is also an interesting side effect of Bug Day. On the first Bug Day there were several bugs that were confirmed to be still live that received patches within a week. These were bugs that were otherwise untouched for over 6 months.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
-
Matt Perry -
Rein Klazes -
Scott Ritchie -
Stefan Dösinger -
Vincent Povirk