Re: AbiWord is too buggy for Bonita

Michael D. Crawford wrote:

>
>> The point is that complaining is not
>> constructive. Complaining is just a waste of time.
>
>
> I thought I made it clear, in my first two mails, that I didn't write
> to complain, but to help you achieve better results in the adoption of
> AbiWord by Windows users.
>
> My criticism was meant to be constructive, I wasn't just bitching.
>
> However, I was quite taken aback that two people posted blunt
> responses asking for bug reports and patches. My feeling was that if
> those you had already received had not helped, then any I might submit
> were not likely to either.

It's not that these things don't help. I report bugs, and they get
fixed. It's just that sometimes bugs are difficult to reproduce, and
this makes finding and removing them difficult. The "tall spaces" bug
you described (number 8904) is under investigation, for example. I, nor
anyone else, knows at the moment how to cause it to occur, even though
it has happened to me several times.

Many bugs are like this. It is unfortunate that Windows printing is one
of these sticky areas: the wide variety of configurations can cause some
bugs to be unreproduceable without specific hardware.

One workaround that goes beyond and becomes useful in all applications
is PDFCreator http://pdfcreator.sf.net . AbiWord prints to PDFCreator
exceptionally well, and Adobe has more money to wrestle with Windows
printing, so Acrobat Reader can often be a useful tool in this way. It
is certainly not ideal, but it does do the trick, and oftentimes you may
find (I know I do) that a PDF "virtual printout" serves just as well as
a real one would, so the printing of the PDF from Acrobat Reader is not
always necessary. One tip with this: telling Acrobat Reader to scale
and rotate appears to change the margins (fitting the entire document
inside the printable area, shrinking the content), so unchecking this
box in the print dialog for Acrobat is usually best.

>
> I was not aware that you were sorely in need of more resources for
> Windows development. What I thought was that you were happily coding
> away on Windows, blind to the effect that your work was having on
> people trying to use it on that platform.

Your thought was far, far from the truth. Our best QA tester uses
Windows (in addition to Mac OS X), and reports all the bugs he finds.
We just have an incredible paucity of developers for this platform, for
a variety of reasons. Feel free to come in, the water's fine! :)

>
> It is all too common for open source developers to respond to
> criticism, even constructive criticism, with a request for bug
> reports. That doesn't win anyone any friends. I got much the same
> response elsewhere when I lamented the loss of my contract proposal to
> open office's bug. I couldn't see how any amount of bug reporting, now
> matter how well-documented and reproducible, would get my text back.

I think the usual problem here is the tendency of users to try to
emphasize how bad a particular bug is, in hopes it will be fixed
faster. Possibly unlike some other projects, at least AbiWord's open
source process means that it's not a lack of desire to fix a bug that
keeps it from being fixed, but a lack of developer time or analysis
(reproduction instructions) of the bug. After a while, I can see how
this could come across to some as asking for something like someone
deserves it, when in fact it was just intended to illustrate the problem.

It may sound a little cold, but simple, straightforward bug reports with
all information that could help a developer track down a bug are the
most helpful, and personal requests or pleas may unintentionally have
the opposite effect of intended. We want to help, and would do so in an
instant if we had the time, money, and information to, but it's not an
ideal world in this respect. The reason these requests for bug reports
are so frequent is because limited developer time is best spent
developing, fixing bugs or otherwise, so any help that a non-developer
could give to reduce the developer time needed, such as writing a clear,
step-by-step bug report, or trying potential fixes, significantly
increase the speed of bug fixing.

>
> It's important to consider the image you present to the public, when
> responding to their comments. Alan's and Dom's posts, pointing out
> that you need more help with Windows, were much more constructive.
>
This is an important point. Image is incredibly important, and I think
what you saw here is not what we like to present, but is related to what
I explained above.

> I won't be able to do much to help for a few days, but I expect I can
> do a lot of good after that. I'll start by going through your bug
> database, to see what I can reproduce.

This is great! Please ask on the list or the IRC channel if there's any
way we (especially the non-developers, such as the QA) can help you out.

>
> You should know, I feel the money I spent on my spotlight license is
> the best money I've ever spent on a development tool. It might be
> non-free software, but I've been able to write some free software
> that's better as a result.

I don't think it's the "free vs. non-free" (speech) issue that keeps
this from occurring - I think it's simply limited resources again at
work against us.

>
> At some point I expect I could get a similar tool for Windows. It
> depends one whether I get paying work that calls for it. But if I do,
> then I'll buy one, and certainly use it to help out abiword.
>
Thank you so much!

> Best,
>
> Michael D. Crawford
> GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
> http://www.goingware.com/
> crawford@goingware.com
>
> Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
>
Thanks for using AbiWord, and we appreciate any help you can give!

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
--
"Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses."  --Confucius