Trustworthy Systems

Bugs: getting them stomped!

Authors

Peter Chubb

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    UNSW,
    Sydney 2052, Australia

Abstract

Eric Raymond invented what he called, Linus's Law: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” What he meant by that was that in the open-source world, where bug reporter, bug fixer, and core developer share a common view of the system, bug reports are of better quality, and fixes are easier to find.

Unfortunately, even though much of what we work on is open-source, it's often hard to work out how to report a problem and get it fixed. Consequently, many of us carry along sets of patches and workarounds for many months, maybe even years, until “something happens.”

In this talk, I'll be attempting to elucidate how to interact with the open-source community so that the problems you have are fixed up-stream. The essence is communication.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Chubb_05b,
    address          = {Brazil},
    author           = {Peter Chubb},
    booktitle        = {Gelato ICE},
    month            = oct,
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/papers/Chubb_05b.pdf},
    title            = {Bugs: Getting them Stomped!},
    year             = {2005}
  }

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