… and nobody reports the bugs.
Or:
What really p***es me off about the “community” nowadays
Yes, time for a little rant of my own now.
Reading the threads in the “Pre Release Beta” subforum makes me shake my head in more than 95% of all cases.
Statement:
Regarding the real value of versions explicitly marked for testing, this subforum is the most misunderstood and therefore most useless part of this (but to make you a bit more comfortable, not only this, it is the same in several different fora) forum.
Reasons for this statement:
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Only a minimal percentage of threads in this subforum really deal with testing unstable versions and reporting bugs to the maintainers/developers.
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There are many threads regarding software not even an officially supported part of the distribution to be tested -or even worse- not even part of other, well respected third party maintainers like packman. Have a look at the amounts of threads regarding proprietary graphics drivers, which are maintained by the vendors and where bugs could only be fixed by them.
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Nearly none of the threads refer to a bug report on the problem, no matter if already exists or (as in most cases) still does not.
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Nearly none of the threads offer test cases how to reproduce potential bugs or describe problems in a way one would expect from somebody being able to actually do some meaningful testing.
Conclusions:
Only few “testers” seem to understand the main reason behind unstable versions and giving them to the community; the opportunity to give feedback to the ones being able to fix bugs.
Instead, this subforum seems to be the trash dump for whining about XYZ not working in an unstable release without any real motivation of actually doing something about it yourself.
Will this really improve the quality of the distribution?
Maybe yes, but only in the way, that hopefully somebody else (no, count me out on that, I’ve given up some time ago. If people don’t have the time and motivation to write decent bug reports at least give valuable descpriptions on the problem on their own, then they shouldn’t use unstable versions) will do some extra work for them (and very often those are the people already doing a lot of work on their own for the same purpose).
Is this what community stands for?
At least for me it isn’t, as it will waste a lot of time for minimal (or even none) extra value.
I don’t know, what the recent definition of community is at the moment, but for me community stands for “take and give back, even if you can’t give back a lot”.
Whining about “xyz not working” without any recognizeable motivation to actually do some work on her/his own is certainly not “community”.
I bet you, when deleting more than 90% of the threads in that subforum one would not throw away anything substantial, maybe it is not a lot better in other subfora, but this can not be something being satisfied with.
This is not about ‘you should not test if you are not a “Linux God” with 15 years of experience and at least 100 contributions to kernel/xorg/glibc/whatever otherwise you are not qualified’, this is about ‘Why do you run test versions, when you obviously don’t even think about reporting problems to the maintainers?’.
Even a rather new user to Linux/openSUSE can contribute to the community, but also a lot of users which seem to be experienced very rarely show that they actually post with the main point for testing in mind.
I don’t get it, I really don’t, maybe somebody can enlighten me, when I seem to have lost the meaning of what I thought “community” and FLOSS stands for.