Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Post Bug Reporting talk (was Apologies and thanks.)

[Michael Dorrington]

Clarke Computers wrote:
> Hi Group,
> 
> Thanks Mike for your talk yesterday - successful in that it left me feeling 
> decidedly guilty, brilliant that you could stand in at such short notice as 
> well.

Since the talk I've submitted two bug reports so far.

The first one is a good example of one that anybody could do. While
getting the links for Dave Crossland's talk: 'Free as in profit (fonts
and software freedom)' on the wiki[1] I noticed that the Lettersoup
page[2], which is a wiki, had been a been hit by a spam bot[3]. I
reverted the page to the last non-spam text and then emailed the owner
about it. I got a nice thank you email back and now the wiki page is
password protected and spam free[2].

The second one is for a game called stormbaancoureur. The report was an
addition to bug that already existed but the issue had escalated in
severity. The report, and fix, was a bit more involved but the talk I
did would give you enough to submit something useful in a report. I
noted down my workflow that I went through which I'll add to my talk
slides. The bug is up there for you to see[4] and follow. The formatting
is a little off thanks to my mail client's poor text handling. Now, will
the Maintainer, Debian Games Team, fix the bug? Will I get shot down in
flames? You'll have to follow it and see.
I submitted the report upstream too and just had a nice email back from
them.

In the talk I was going to say: "Don't call yourself a free software
advocate if you haven't submitted a bug report." but thought it might be
too harsh. But now I think that whether you've submitted a bug report,
or not, separates out the freedom lovers, which is what free software is
about, from the freetards, who want things at no cost, which is *not*
what free software is about. If anyone needs help with submitting a bug
report or wants me to go through the talk with them then I am happy to
do so.

Regards,
Mike.
MFS Chair.

[1] <http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Manchester/2008-09-16>
[2] <http://tinkerhouse.net/lettersoup/>
[3] <http://tinkerhouse.net/lettersoup/Main/HomePage?action=diff>
[4] <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=534773>