Slashdot Mirror
Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug
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.)"
I used Mozilla and reported what I thought was a bug. I was surprised and elated by the response that I got in order to try to fix it. Not that this will be a terribly exciting post for other /.ers but that was my experience. However, I want to like Mozilla....really I do.
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
This may be me just being hideously misinformed, but I have no idea what to expect for a project of this size? I mean it does sound like a helluva lot . . .
Mind you, I suppose it's better they all get reported and fixed than ignored until someone independant BugTraqs your ass.
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
<old timer mode>I remember Netscape .9, and wondering if it would ever reach 1.0. We'd say, what more could 1.0 do -- it's such a revolution!</otm>
most of bugs in bugzilla aren't real 'bugs', as in code flaws, but rather wishes for enhancement / policies.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
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 :)
Am I the only person who thinks that counting bugs, all bugs, any bugs, is a bit meaningless? I mean, 1,000 bugs like 'left margin on submit buttons is 1 px too narrow on some displays' worry me less than 1 bug like 'all your credit card details will be posted on 500 weblogs around the world'. What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale, where a 'light breeze' bug could almost be called an endearing quirk, and a 'hurricane' bug is likely to trash your hard disc...
Virtually serving coffee
Everybody knows that Mozilla hasn't any bu
Well IE has a great deal of bugs as well.
The count of mozilla bugs here includes the production bugs as well. I'm sure IE went through a load of bugs while developping it. Unfortunatly these numbers are not comparable.
Yeah I'd like it to load in less than a week and use less that 128Mb to view 'HelloWorld.html'.
;-).
So what's all this about: Mozilla riddled with security holes.
:)
Even with the "bugs", I still love Mozilla, mind
At the risk of feeding:
For crashes, Mozilla has the talkback feature. If Mozilla crashes, and it hardly ever does anymore, all you need to do is type the url you visited, and click send. That's it.
For other bugs: people will, and do, report them if they are really annoyed with a bug and want to see it fixed. Even if only one in a thousand take the time to file a bugreport you'd still have a pretty large number.
Got brain?
According to the whois database :
;-)
Record created on 24-Jan-1998.
So, 1747 days have gone since this creation (I assume nobody could file bugs on mozilla.org before this date).
We now have 178,325 bugs, so the average is 102 bugs per day.
So, the next 21,675 bugs will be files in approximately 212 days, making the 200kth bug being filed around June 5th...
Now of course, we could assume that as Mozilla becomes stabler and stabler, the filings should now slow down logarithmically, making the filing so late that we'll have have switched to Phoenix 4.0+gno/kMutt in the meantime...
But why expecting a CD when we have apt-get ?
How, yes : because it would not be the 1.0 version but rather a subsequent one.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
and I quote "Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled." Looks like someone has the right idea.
I'm not; it's part of human nature. There are even people, who will find fault with the weather, when it's perfect, so why should 200.000 bug reports surprise anyone? And don't forget, lots of those may be a case of PEBKAC.
Stefan.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Competiton: Slashdot's 10,000,000th Typo
Posted by CmdrTaco on 08:00 AM November 5th, 2002
from the VA's-lowered-budget-can't-afford-spellcheckers dept.
CmdrTaco writes "Slashdot is about to see its 10,000,000th typo. Tis is the 9,999,999th one. Not terribly exciting in itself, but we're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the slashdot hoard will notice the milestone-breaking spelling mistake. The prize is a poster-size copy of Mrs. Malda's revealing low-cut shot." The typo will show up anytime now - good lukc everyone!
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.
Thats easy I guess I got the same, if you trace mozilla you will notice that it hangs at opening "/dev/dsp" which is blocked by xmms.
;) Then don't start mozilla normally, start it with "artsdsp /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla", artsdsp will force mozilla to work with artsd, and wolla xmms and mozilla share happily the same sound device via artsd. (and mozilla does not hand anymore)
You're running xmms using artsd? If not you should
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
A bug has been discovered in Bugzilla, which caused it to count every reported bug 5 times. This brings the total number of reported bugs in BugZilla to 83240.
Why not? Afraid that Asa might backtrace you by the data in the crashdump, and call your wife?
Just report the damn URL, give the developers something to enjoy. Or is your "someone" underage, maybe?
Got brain?
I doubt it'll last long if Slashdot's users care enough to compete - just don't Slashdot the bug reporting page.
Reminds me of some awful news stations around here:
Although only 300 people died in the earthquake, it could have been worst.
OLPC Australia
C'mon, let's keep our wishes in the realm of possibilites ;) hehehe
If this bug count is actually high for this kind of project (and I'm not sure that it is), I imagine it would have to do with the fact that it is an OpenSource project. In a traditional development method, there would be a great deal of internal testing that might result in less bugs being noticed by users. In a situation like Mozilla, there would be so many users testing the product through the development life cycle that many bugs would be reported that might have already been anticipated or discovered and repaired by the time it was being used by users. It seems that instead of a more traditional cycle of build, test, repair, release, in OpenSource you have a build, release, test, repair, release which probably results in inflated bug counts.
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
...buggy software?
;)
Include me out!
(C'mon, I get it, really I do
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale
Each Bugzilla entry carries a "severity" anywhere from "enhancement" (request for additional functionality) to "trivial" (slight misalignment of text in form pushbuttons) to "minor" to "normal" to "major" to "critical" (usually a crash or data loss) to "blocker" (a build fails smoketests).
Will I retire or break 10K?
That figure represents all feature work, enhancements, dupes, metabugs, Chimera, CCK. Mozilla.org, Bugzilla (bugs about Bugzilla), internationalization, platform specific, mail/news, browser, embedding, chrome, documentation and actual bugs in existence. The number of genuine bugs of any importance in the browser is likely to be a small fraction of the total.
Although only almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are - and will be - massively many more bugs that will never be discovered, less so reported.
Among these bugs are certain combinations of for instance 278 nested divs with a loose font tag amidst all.
frawaradaR anahaha islaginaR!
Yep, I'm selling these IE1.0 CDs on ebay and making a fortune!
I won't buy it at least, since I can get IE 1.0 for free. Ha! That along with Winamp 0.20 give me a whole new multimedia experience!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
...and at about 12.30pm GMT, my inbox was suddenly deluged with entries. Even without looking, I knew why that would be... :-)
Gerv
Umm... 1993! Oh no wait, that's Microsoft, you wanted Mozilla.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
I mean, the stupid "Happy Bugday" pun hasn't even been mentioned yet ?
theefer
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Given some of the above comments, this needs saying. This is a fun contest, and the prize is small. Anyone who tries to spam the database in any way will only mean that we can't have this fun any more. So please don't. And it won't work anyway, because we'll notice and stop you.
:-)
If you have an automatic bug creation script, please point it at Landfill, the Bugzilla test installation, which needs all the test bugs it can get
Gerv
but won't run on Redhat 6.1 like Opera will. :-(
comeon now. if you've got a box that NEED to be running RH 6.1, i'd question the need for a web browser (outside of _maybe_ lynx). if you need a web browser on the box, get with the times. the upgrade cd's are relatively cheep, chances are someone will send um to you if you can't download/burn the iso's.
pheonix is based on the mozilla core w/ all the extras ripped out (email, irc, composer, etc). there's times for those features
Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering and free beer/speech (neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?) but cleaner and faster than the competition IMHO. Give it a try. Its own Bugzilla bug reporting makes for a sort of amusing read, if you're idle. Same problem, lots of redundant bugs or "whoops my machine was messed up" or "gee, wouldn't it be great for you to work your tail off for free to deliver this obscure feature."
Bugs can wear you out, the Web is still pretty raw. Now, I didn't want this mention of Chimera to be redundant, so I searched Slashdot first and got:
Searching For: chimera
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 14:42:04 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80
Is that when it catches up to the Internet Explorer bug count?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
And a massive pile of duplicate reports to boot.
It was a really simple fix, too. All you had to do was add a flag to the open() commmand. Macromedia wasn't exactly ignoring the product, either. Since the bug was reported to them (with solution, remember), they've had two or three minor releases of that line of Flash plugin, and nobody there bothered to fix that one line of code. Highly frustrating. One of the more recent posts on the Bugzilla bug was from someone at Macromedia, though, apologizing for how long it's taken, and the 6.0beta does fix the problem.
Anyway, that's more than you probably ever wanted to know about the thing. The only way Mozilla itself could have fixed this was to make all plugins threaded, so if the thread hangs nobody cares, but that's a lot of work that nobody felt like doing. Oh, and people were originally thinking they could just do a binary-patch to the flash plugin, but evidentally the extra flag to open() increases the bytecount of the command by one, which makes doing so rather impossible . . .
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
Oh, I think Spyglass hated them... once they started giving out the product for free....
.sig: be the majority of voters
If you don't understand this, try Help/About Internet Explorer in any Windows copy of IE....
--
Remainder of my
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
I betcha you have something faster than the 14,400 kbps modem us Netscape 0.9 users had! 300k is still 3 minutes at 14.4 speeds.
"Okay, it does take a bit longer, on that 14,400 kbps modem, but the Mosaic Communications people have developed it so the text on the pages loads before the pictures. That way, you have something to read while you wait for a picture to load. Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)"
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Considering that Mozilla 1.1 is out and Mozilla 1.2 beta is out, you might as well complain about bugs in IE 1.0 while you're at it.
but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla.
Also if the person with the 200,00th bug can name the song of the day he'll win two tickets to see Styx live at The Meadowlands.
This really isn't Mozilla's fault - it is the fault of the plugin blocking on opening /dev/dsp, rather than moving on.
And it it "Voila" - literally "look at that", not wolla.
www.eFax.com are spammers
In all the years I have used mozilla I have encountered few bugs. I am suprised there are so many.
They're not all unique. I filed a bug for 1.2 that ended up having somewhere around 100 other reports marked as duplicates.
Its a continuum between all three. One user's annoyance may be an intentional feature. It also may not be a serious failure, but a future enhancement . Because of this continnuum, a good support and development database puts all three together.
There are also may be duplication. The person updating the database may overlook a similar
bug or may not be sure it is the same. The same deep root cause may have a variety of manifestations.
The bug/enhacements databse is one of the most important software engineering tools. Its a good way to tie users, support, and developers together. It is a metric for progress in software stability.
Five of which are already fixed. Contrast that to security flaws in IE which require you to install fixes with the shiny new BillG 0wNs j00 EULA. (Of course that's if MS deign to fix the bugs at all rather than get in a hissy fit with whomever exposed them)
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
I reported a Mozilla bug once. I tried to search for duplicates, but have you seen that god-awful search form that Bugzilla has? I must have done the search wrong, because it turns out there were several duplicates.
Big waste of everyone's time, because someone had to analyze my bug report before they noticed it was a dupe.
You're assuming that the number of bugs filed per day is nearly constant, which is not the case. As the browser gains popularity, more and more people are filing bugs. (Which are more and more duplicate or invalid bugs, mind you....)
As much as I hate to link to MQ, here is a chart from just over a year ago showing the number of bugs filed. Assuming Mangelo has enough brain cells to do a proper graph, I think you can see the trend....
The formal name of the browser product is "Navigator" -- even more annoying. Chimera is the name of the GPL project -- I don't know what they had in mind, but can't keep it because Chimera wouldn't give them permission (I assume trademark). The name game comes up often on their message board, and I'm sure they'd welcome our suggestions (not).
... hmmm ... how about "Xplorer"?? Or "It Works Better Than It Sounds"?
Verion 1.0 would be a nice time to pick a real name. Many have been proposed. My least favorite, iGuana (get it -- "gecko"?).
Something novel
greeeeeeaaaat. so that one cd can hang around with my 200,000 AOL cds i have floating around.....
(Do a search in the page for 'bugzilla' and you will see that two mozilla bugs have been addressed.)
...that's good, right?
Well, we all need that hybrid word. I guess we have one: free.
If you're running windows, try K-Meleon. the .7 release just came out, which is even faster than .6, and has one hell of a good implementation of tabs(IMHO)
kmeleon.sourceforge.net
It's been a long time.
Those are a lot of threads, displayed by a ps that doesn't grok threads
It could be running on Linux where a thread and a process is essentially the same thing.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
If the 200,000th bug was an oversight of an FAQ?
--Joey
You didn't get the joke, did you?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I want to know how to access this feature:
Bookmarks can be downloaded at a certain schedule
One can set bookmarks to be checked at various schedules and notify when the content has changed. At least, in theory.
I think this one may be BS due to the in theory part. And the title should be changed to things Mozilla hopes to do that IE can't. Either that or it's another case of me just missing a menu in the config, if anybody knows about this one please fill me in.
Thanks!
Haha. She listens to Tori Amos 24/7 and overidentifies with every song. Last I heard, she has about as much of a life as me -- ie, none.