About reporting problems (was: Re: Speechd-up Issues)

Hynek Hanke hanke at volny.cz
Fri May 7 07:43:14 EDT 2004


On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 02:05:26PM +1000, Shaun Oliver wrote:
> you all need to remember one thing.
> speechd_up and speechd-dispatcher and the speakup softsynth driver are 
> [...]
> 6. run speechd_up with the "-s" flag. note the lower case s.
> 7. do a ctrl+c and kill speechd_up.
> 8. run speechd_up again with no flags. 
> You have speech! how about that.
> there's the steps outlined for you all to follow. now as I said it is at 
> best experimental so don't bitch if it don't work.

Hi everyone,

I strongly disagree with this. I agree that the named things are still very new
and probably contains many bugs. But I don't like the attitude that not
talking about it and doing some nasty tricks like killing it and restarting
it will help to fix anything.

I'm a developer of Speech Dispatcher and Speechd-Up. I know there seems to be
a problem with executing speechd-up in scripts. I can't reproduce it on
my machine. So if I don't get information from you, users, if you stop
bitching and will just use the kill-restart ugly hack, then the thing will
never get fixed. I can't fix problems I don't see.

So please, continue reporting all kinds of bugs, both in the programs
and in documentation. It helps very much if you provide a detailed information.
Write us the involved programs versions, try to switch on logging and send
part of logs that you think are relevant (and be prepared to post full logs
if asked for it), try to reproduce the error with different programs under
different circumstances and send as all the data you can collect. The important
thing is raw data like ,,I did this and that and it did this thing, but I think
it should have done that thing. Then I did this and this and it did that.''.
Speculating about the possible causes of the problem (if you have some insight)
is also good, but it is no replacement for raw data. A bug-report without
raw data, based on speculations, is totally useless. Also, such workarounds
as killing and restarting something are useless in the long term. A brief
resume from previous posts about what is known about the problem so far is quite
helpful, but don't bother with it if you don't have time.

The Free Software model of developement is quite different from the
ordinary proprietary models. Users have to participate, help to fix
things, report bugs.  If they don't, they will have only bad and buggy
software. I cannot stress that enough: ,,The software will not fix
itself in future versions. It will not get better from itself alone.
*You* have to make it better for yourself.''

With Regards,
Hynek Hanke




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