Question: what so bad about bug reports?

[Eelke]

Code reader, the point is, there are probably many more* people like you, who will also spot the same bug. And because of the nature of unfinished code, "bugs" will be fairly easy to spot and there is going to be a *LOT* to report, by many people. Sifting through hunderds of (more than likely) the same "bug reports" is going to take a awful lot more time than having a smallish number of developers reviewing each other's code.

Code reviews are obviously a good thing, for the reasons you mention, but only when you get at a stage where bugs will become harder to spot, it's a good idea to open up the floor to many more people. Which is, as I imagine, the idea of opening up a bug tracker once the first beta hits the streets.

I do sincerely hope the developers are doing code reviews among themselves for the reasons you mention. But your reasons are arguments for doing code reviews within the team, at this point, not for opening up a public bug reporting mechanism.

*: Of course, whether there really is many more is up for dicussion. But then there are also those that just download the CVS code, start playing around, find something doesn't work and will just file a bug report, if those were requested at this point. I always find it's better to put a line at a clearly defined level like "no bug reports" (which means you probably loose one or two "good" things as well), than to put the line at an unclear level like "Only bug reports that are very obviously errors in the code, nothing else".

I have a rule on my forum, no animated avatars or signatures, to stop forum-pages from becoming blinking and bouncing cyberdisco's. That also means very subtle animations that aren't really a problem in that respect are still not allowed. Not because they are a problem in their own right, but because I don't want a discussion about what's acceptable and what's not.

[APTX]

The only way I see any way of making the community do somethin would be when DEVs themselves ask a question like "Why won't X do Y?"... as giving unwanted anwsers (bug reports) is uncalled for. I'm pretty sure the DEVs wion't want to do that though...

[cyberCrank]

Once we hit the first beta we will open the bug tracker and everyone is invited to report bugs as hell

Well -- we realize that bug-reporting will get "fired up" as the Beta and RCs hit the street, but we can also presume that the Bugs from Hell will be the hardest & hottest to fix and handle via the tracker...

** realizing "hell" was meant to be "well", but Bugs from Hell seemed rather apropos for the hard ones to fix **

[Acyd Burn]

I have to add that the possibility exist that we open the bug tracker before beta too. This highly depends on how progress is made. If for example the sections not yet finished get to a reasonable state, we might think about first collecting some bug reports to see if a beta is possible in a short timeframe.

[Mark The Daemon]

Does that mean that a beta version is coming out shortly then?!?!?

[dhn]

Does that mean that a beta version is coming out shortly then?!?!?

It depends on your definition of shortly. There is no date set yet, but the development is picking up a lot of speed, the first community coding projects are close to have finished code - everything is on the right track. After we get 2.0.18 out of the house, a major release for the 2.0.x line, the developers can hopefully concentrate completely on Olympus.

[APTX]

At last. I just hope nothing else comes up.

[Martin Blank]

After we get 2.0.18 out of the house, a major release for the 2.0.x line

Based on the number of fixes submitted in the past few weeks, this is a release that I (and many other with heavily modded boards) both relish because of the work that can be done on Olympus, and fear because of the time it will take to update everything.