Re: What is a bug, what is a bug report?

rjf wrote:
nano bagonghi wrote:


A bug is a bug. I don't care who or how reports it.
Even little information is better than none.


Wrong. It is an almost universal observation from people who receive bug reports professionally or as a courtesy as part of maintaining free software, that the vast majority of so-called bugs are simply "user error" and have almost no informational value whatsoever.

Maybe I have some problems in letting myself understood,
since I'm not mothertongue. I apologize.

I wrote earlier (see above) that in principle I do not care how
much detailed is a bug report.
By reporting a bug I mean reporting a bug, i.e.,
a correct input which produce a wrong answer,
not reporting a "user error".
I thought it was obvious that when I said
"little information is better than none" I was *not*
saying "little information, correct or not, is better than none".

So I believe that reporting that a certain
correct input produces a wrong answer has always a value,
even if the reporter has not the capacities or the will
to investigate where exactly lies the problem.

That was what I wanted to say. You instead are comparing
"detailed bug reports" agains "erroneous bug reports
due to user stupidity". There is no connection with what
I said.

Said that, I have no interest in entering a war flame
in favour or against VB, whose drastic views about
CAS capabilities I do not always condivide.

As an example of bug report:
I reported (not here, on the Mathematica group, with my
"official" name) a bug
on the implementation of the Ramanujan Tau function in version
6.0. I was curious so I investigated also the cause of
the error, by unprotecting and listing the functions
used in the computation, so I was able to tell exactly
where the error was. But even if I had only
said,
"Look, RamanujanTau[x] gives an erroneous value for x prime
greater than ...."
I think that would have been sufficient to trigger
an internal investigation or tell anybody using that
function to be careful. Note that in this
case there was not an easy and fast way to check the
correctness of the computed value

g.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Reporting a NetSurf error..?
    ... and, I daresay, an early PV amongst others when reporting ... The log file is usually reduced dramatically when you zip it. ... bug reports should be submitted via the Sourceforge web site and not ... so Base64 encoding doesn't apply. ...
    (comp.sys.acorn.apps)
  • Re: Reporting bugs about Ubuntu
    ... apport to report more detailed bug reports we will help to help make Ubuntu ... You have made bug reporting using Apport not better but worse. ...
    (Ubuntu)