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Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the does-chimera-ssl-hanging-count-as-a-bug dept.

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla's 200,000th bug will soon be reported. Not terribly exciting in itself, but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug reporting tool. The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day. Anyone can enter, so let's see if we can have a Slashdot winner (we can all share in the glory)! To help you, they're up to 178,325 and 51 bugs have been filled today. (NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"

7 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I love mozilla by psavo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    most of bugs in bugzilla aren't real 'bugs', as in code flaws, but rather wishes for enhancement / policies.

    --
    fucktard is a tenderhearted description
  2. uhmmm... just wait a second... by jukal · · Score: 4, Insightful
    but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported

    before I finish this shell script to flood the bug report database... reset rate-counter...right, the 200 000th bug will be reported in about 42 minutes and 42 seconds. I mean seriously, their intention is probably good - to get serious bug reports - but you can just assume the side effects with all the geeks involved :)

  3. A dumb idea by an_mo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. The incentive is just to encourage fake bug reporting, with costs rather than benefits, to the whole project.

    A better choice would have been to pick a random winner from valid bugs filed from today until bug 200K.

    1. Re:A dumb idea by Queuetue · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Read again - the bug submitter doesn't win. It's pool to guess when the bug will be submitted.

  4. Re:Not many bugs, eh? by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Who said Mozilla was perfect? The difference is you can see what bugs are open, assess their importance and see when they are fixed. If a bug bothers you that much, you can even take the patch and retroactively apply it to a branch, e.g. 1.0.x or wait for the next nightly of course. You don't have to wait months for the next 'service pack' or listen to MS or whoever when they fob you off saying an exploit is 'theoretical'.


    Of course, security issues are hidden in Bugzilla until they are made public, but that once they become public knowledge (e.g. through The Register article) they are are unlocked. The locked phase is just a period of grace to allow the problem to be worked on privately without alerting every script kiddie to its existence.

  5. 200,000 reported... by Penguinoflight · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not 200,000 bugs that are bugs. There are many, many duplicate bugs even though Mozilla asks people to look over the bugs and not duplicate. Also, many of these bugs are actually to get Mozilla to render a page "Correctly" when the page is written totally wrong, I.E. not W3.org valid, like slashdot.org, only worse. My guess is that about 1/3 of the bugs are really bugs, the rest are dups, features, or just dumb stuff.

    --
    "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
    1 John 4:14
  6. Feature Requests are counted by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Amongst these 200000 bugs are feature requests, duplicates, bugs that aren't really bugs and platform specific issues. What percentage this is of the whole I am not sure, but it would certainly go to reducing the total number.

    What would be of interest is how this tallies to any other product where the general public could submit straight to the bug database, rather than going through front-line, second-line and then third-line support.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.