After submitting a bug.. (BugZilla)

[Marzz]

I'm curious about people's experience with bug-fixes in ReactOS. In January, oldman has been so kind to post a bug-report for me (CORE-7818). It is about a program called OpenBUGS (http://www.openbugs.net/w/Downloads), which is open source software and runs fine in Wine. However, after a successful installation the program doesn't start in ReactOS.

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea how difficult and time-consuming it would be to fix.. In Jira, the bug report been assigned to BugZilla and hasn't been updated since (given that the software already runs in Wine I guess BugZilla isn't the Wine bugs-system?) Anyway, I know developers have other and more important things to do, so fixing this particular program is not urgent (at all). But perhaps people on the forum can explain how things work. Are program-specific bugs (that are not selected for the Community Edition) even being looked at and fixed? Or is ReactOS just developed until -one day- problematic programs simply all start working?

[Webunny]

I'm curious about people's experience with bug-fixes in ReactOS. In January, oldman has been so kind to post a bug-report for me (CORE-7818). It is about a program called OpenBUGS (http://www.openbugs.net/w/Downloads), which is open source software and runs fine in Wine. However, after a successful installation the program doesn't start in ReactOS.

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea how difficult and time-consuming it would be to fix.. In Jira, the bug report been assigned to BugZilla and hasn't been updated since (given that the software already runs in Wine I guess BugZilla isn't the Wine bugs-system?) Anyway, I know developers have other and more important things to do, so fixing this particular program is not urgent (at all). But perhaps people on the forum can explain how things work. Are program-specific bugs (that are not selected for the Community Edition) even being looked at and fixed? Or is ReactOS just developed until -one day- problematic programs simply all start working?

While many, many bugs are fixed (some of which are regressions), I do not think there is any concerted effort to systematically look into new bug(report)s and fix them. I said before that ROS would benefit from someone dedicated in managing all bugreports, but z98 answered..well, something I can't readily remember, but no doubt it would fall in the category of 'too little resources'. As is the case with almost everything.

Personally, I filed a bug (actually a regression), which I made strenuous efforts to pinpoint (it was on RH, and without a serial cable). And it got fixed. See viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12924 .

So, some bugs - certainly the make-or-break ones - get fixed, but on the other hand, some have been lingering around for years. There is no way to tell, if it's a minor bug/regression, if it will ever be fixed before the next release.

[Black_Fox]

The problem with bugs is, we don't know how much work is needed to fix them as we log them. Sometimes only a slight behaviour modification is needed, but you have to reorganize half a component, sometimes a function is missing, but it can be added in 10 lines of code. Also the developers are doing it in their free time, so they sometimes try to fix important bugs and sometimes try to fix bugs that interest them.
Regarding that specific bugreport, there is no information in the log at all, so the developers won't know easily where to start looking. The programs also are very specialised, so that together lowers the chance of them being fixed quickly. You may be better off to contact the OpenBUGS developer and ask them about ReactOS compatibility. They could help pinpoint the issue in ReactOS.

As for the speed of the fix, that's hard to say. I have logged "many" bugs on ROS, of them a lot were fixed and a lot were not

[Marzz]

Thanks guys - and Black_Fox for taking a look at the bug-report!
Very informative. And because the OpenBugs developers are not going to support ReactOS any time soon, I think, I'll just wait and see what happens with ReactOS 0.4.

[Frontier]

It's not really about them supporting ROS, just ask them to run their code on ours with a debugger attached and seeing what function calls are causing it to crash (or as it's open source, doing it yourself).