Ask HN: Do You Report Bugs?

2 points by GRBurst 3 years ago | 1 comment

So yesterday, my browser crashed completely and after restarting it, all extensions were disabled and their corresponding configurations were gone.

Usually, a popup shows up after a crash, but not this time. Since the hurdle is so big, I didn't report the bug.

Many tools and programs don't have a good way to report bug.

So I am wondering: Do you report bugs? If you are, what is the hurdle you accept to do so?

retrocryptid 3 years ago |

Why bother? Bug reports are ignored by large software teams at large companies. The small software I write... mostly I just fix it and push the code. I do try to write reasonable descriptions of the changes I'm pushing, so that's sort of like a bug report. And I have submitted "issues" on GitHub projects.

My favourte bug report was for a Microsoft product that shall remain nameless. I reported a bug five years ago and it was pushed off to a community discussion site. All the MSFT employees claimed it wasn't a bug. All the non-MSFT people said "no. that's a bug that should be fixed." Thankfully there was a workaround but I think the bug will remain until the API is deprecated after a few more windows releases.

It's weird that small open source projects that don't have "official" headcount for CPE seem to be responsive to bug reports, but large software companies with large budgets and huge staffs would rather have people talk about the bug than fix it.