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Author Topic: Bug Busters  (Read 65451 times)

JuhaManninen

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Bug Busters
« on: September 14, 2014, 06:04:53 pm »
Hello

We are slowly moving towards the next Lazarus 1.4 release. (No fixed date yet.)
The list of open issues targeted for 1.4 is partly cleaned. There were ~400 of them (for historical reasons), now they are down to ~140.

Maybe due to increased popularity the total number of open bug reports has grown rapidly, now 1700+ and counting. New reports are opened faster than developers can solve them.

The development team is apparenly under-powered. Some areas are not maintained as actively as they should.
I would now like to ask help with the bug reports, not only the ones targeted for 1.4 but any report.
I know there are talented coders here. For example graphics oriented people may find these easy to solve:
  http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=7230
and
  http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=7290

I believe there are bugs for everyone's taste. If some people here take their most annoying bug and fix it, it would directly benefit the next version. What is a realistic number of patches to expect? I don't know, surprise me...

There is another problem: finding patches from old bug reports is difficult due to Mantis UI. The list shows the number of attachments for each report, but most of them are not patches.
There may well be more ignored patches sitting there which is bad. If anybody knows about valid, ignored patches, please tell.
From now on, when you attach a patch, mark the issue with a tag "patch". The category "Patch" is not very usefull because patches can finally be attached to any report.

P.S.
The historical reason I mentioned is that years ago people targeted bugs and feature requests for 1.0 and "post 1.0", then for 1.2 and "post 1.2". Eventually all of them were postponed into 400 issues for 1.4.
Mostly Lazarus trunk and FPC 3.2 on Manjaro Linux 64-bit.

Mike.Cornflake

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #1 on: September 14, 2014, 06:16:52 pm »
A noble call there.  Sorry I haven't contributed as much as I could have...  I'm browsing Mantis now...

Quote
There may well be more ignored patches sitting there which is bad. If anybody knows about valid, ignored patches, please tell.

What's the official mechanism for reporting possible ignored patches?  Bump the issue in Mantis, direct email someone or post here?

UPDATE:  Never mind, think I've worked it out.  Simply attach the "patch" tag to the issue should do it...
« Last Edit: September 14, 2014, 06:26:57 pm by Mike.Cornflake »
Lazarus Trunk/FPC Trunk on Windows [7, 10]
  Have you tried searching this forum or the wiki?:   http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Alternative_Main_Page
  BOOKS! (Free and otherwise): http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Pascal_and_Lazarus_Books_and_Magazines

JuhaManninen

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #2 on: September 14, 2014, 06:41:20 pm »
Bump the issue in Mantis by adding the "patch" tag and a note is good.
A post here or in the Lazarus mailing list is good, too.
Mostly Lazarus trunk and FPC 3.2 on Manjaro Linux 64-bit.

taazz

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2014, 07:03:26 pm »
1) How can I see those 400 (or 140 now) from the 1200 total as you say so I know what to expect in the next release?
2) how about a replication mechanism for bugs so we can download them once a day week or even month to see what we can build on top of the existing database?
Good judgement is the result of experience … Experience is the result of bad judgement.

OS : Windows 7 64 bit
Laz: Lazarus 1.4.4 FPC 2.6.4 i386-win32-win32/win64

BigChimp

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2014, 07:22:13 pm »
1. Bug tracker, select Lazarus project, view issues, filter on LazTarget equal to 1.4. Press apply You can save filters etc. I currently see 140 so that seems about right. (You probably will need to filter out the ones with closed/resolved status as squashing continues)
2. No idea what you mean exactly. You can repeat step 1 whenever you want.
Want quicker answers to your questions? Read http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Faq#What_is_the_correct_way_to_ask_questions_in_the_forum.3F

Open source including papertiger OCR/PDF scanning:
https://bitbucket.org/reiniero

Lazarus trunk+FPC trunk x86, Windows x64 unless otherwise specified

taazz

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #5 on: September 14, 2014, 07:45:57 pm »
1. Bug tracker, select Lazarus project, view issues, filter on LazTarget equal to 1.4. Press apply You can save filters etc. I currently see 140 so that seems about right. (You probably will need to filter out the ones with closed/resolved status as squashing continues)
Thank you I'll see what I come up with.
2. No idea what you mean exactly. You can repeat step 1 whenever you want.

Imagine a client application (bug tracker) that uses the mantis database schema in the background (Mysql, firebird embedded or access doesn't matter at this point everything is only theoretical) any chance of me connecting to a service that will return to me data for various tables that I can populate that database with the bug report from the site directly to my database? Or even better an html page, I login to my mantis account, type in my last replicated date and get a json/xml/what ever file with everything that changed since that date? Of course everything that I have access to I do not need the user accounts or internal bugs that I did not had access from the web anyway. if nothing of the above is availabe is there a backup of the database with only the public issues that I can use for my client app development?

Do not take to seriously as I said it is theoretical at this point I do not know if I'm ever going to start working on this client and if I do I think I can find a few public sample mantis databases to grind my teeth at.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2014, 07:47:59 pm by taazz »
Good judgement is the result of experience … Experience is the result of bad judgement.

OS : Windows 7 64 bit
Laz: Lazarus 1.4.4 FPC 2.6.4 i386-win32-win32/win64

valdir.marcos

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #6 on: September 14, 2014, 08:38:58 pm »

taazz

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #7 on: September 14, 2014, 08:51:05 pm »
Good judgement is the result of experience … Experience is the result of bad judgement.

OS : Windows 7 64 bit
Laz: Lazarus 1.4.4 FPC 2.6.4 i386-win32-win32/win64

valdir.marcos

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #8 on: September 14, 2014, 08:58:09 pm »
@JuhaManninen

On this forum, I believe we have programmers of all levels.

Do Mantis tickets can be sorted (and searched) for hardness of solution? For example, "01" for "very easy to solve" through "10" to "very difficult to solve".
This would help new contributtors to choose tickets according to their experience.

I also believe that links below can be usefull for new contributtors:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Creating_A_Patch
http://wiki.freepascal.org/How_To_Help_Developing_Lazarus
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Multiple_Lazarus
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Faq#Contributing_.2F_Making_Changes_to_Lazarus
http://wiki.freepascal.org/How_do_I_create_a_bug_report


taazz

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #9 on: September 14, 2014, 09:07:37 pm »
is it a bad time to ask once more to be able to catch sigsegv exception in my applications or I'm out of line?

It gets more and more frustrating by the month and probably this will force me back to delphi (for windows development at least).

Any way I'm working with the extra highlighters from http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=18248 and I made good progress today they all work in my modified test app and probably I will upload there a new compressed file with packages to be placed on the CCR in the next couple of days. (nothing to do with the next release just a heads up).

The good news is that today I order the parts needed to fix my desktop computer and I'll be able to install  and work on the trunk version when I'm done. This will give me more time on working with lazarus directly.
Good judgement is the result of experience … Experience is the result of bad judgement.

OS : Windows 7 64 bit
Laz: Lazarus 1.4.4 FPC 2.6.4 i386-win32-win32/win64

valdir.marcos

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #10 on: September 14, 2014, 09:12:24 pm »
@JuhaManninen

I believe many people here can and would like to contibute, but hey do not know how to do it.
So they try to contribute opening tickets on Mantis.

As you noted, I also believe that  increased number of new thickets indicates that Lazarus popularity is growing fast and that information is positive.

valdir.marcos

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #11 on: September 14, 2014, 09:24:00 pm »
@JuhaManninen

On the main page of http://lazarus.freepascal.org/ can we have a box similar to "Recent Forum Posts" that shows "Recent Opened/Changed Tickets"?

Or at least, a box similar to "Community" called maybe "Help Development" that shows links like the ones we are posting on this thread? We could put "Recent Opened/Changed Tickets" as on of those links.

valdir.marcos

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #12 on: September 14, 2014, 09:25:20 pm »
@JuhaManninen

Does Mantis has any kind of tool for voting? If so, this would clarify what tickets are more needed by community.

taazz

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #13 on: September 14, 2014, 09:41:13 pm »
@JuhaManninen

On the main page of http://lazarus.freepascal.org/ can we have a box similar to "Recent Forum Posts" that shows "Recent Opened/Changed Tickets"?

Or at least, a box similar to "Community" called maybe "Help Development" that shows links like the ones we are posting on this thread? We could put "Recent Opened/Changed Tickets" as on of those links.

No, all this are good to have but it will not help push more patches back to the team. In fact I think except a very small number of developers the ones that will read them have already red them just to be able to test what ever they need to test the rest will rather spend their time producing than patching. If you want to increase the number of patches you need to make sure that the process is as unobstructive as possible. You need to prepare an expert that will do the following.
1) support svn/git or what ever your primary VCS is.
2) to be able to check and report changes made to files that the user has placed under survailance or has edited in his hard drive.
3) be able to checkout the newest version and build the IDE in one go no ifs or buts or anything if the new ide fails to load it will revert automatically back to last known one
4) create a patch against the repository from the existing code that means that the patch should be a two step process
  1) find what is changed against the checked out revision
  2) compare the changes with the latest revision at patch creation and if there are problems then and only then stop otherwise create the patch.
5) being able to post the patch directly to the bug tracker from inside lazarus will be a welcome ability but not very important at this time, this requires some kind of web service or some fort of html aware controls that can login to mantis and post a message/bug/etc.

Than will make the patching almost brain dead process and more people would be able to start pushing patches/bugs etc. This is the main reason I was asking all those mantis questions earlier.
Good judgement is the result of experience … Experience is the result of bad judgement.

OS : Windows 7 64 bit
Laz: Lazarus 1.4.4 FPC 2.6.4 i386-win32-win32/win64

JuhaManninen

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Re: Bug Busters
« Reply #14 on: September 14, 2014, 09:42:42 pm »
Imagine a client application (bug tracker) that uses the mantis database schema in the background ...

There is a feature request for such application
  http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=19799
However is has a very low priority IMO. There are plenty of critical bugs and missing features in Lazarus, and the current Mantis browser GUI works very well.
So taazz, please first fix the other bugs in Lazarus and then you can make the Mantis client app. :)
« Last Edit: September 14, 2014, 11:01:11 pm by JuhaManninen »
Mostly Lazarus trunk and FPC 3.2 on Manjaro Linux 64-bit.

 

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