[support] Best way to fix a bug?

[Jim Smith]

These are good tips! Thank you. 

The one thing that these tips don't solve, though, is what to do when
the maintainer doesn't respond quickly enough for my needs. Let's face
it, some maintainers are more diligent than others for tackling bugs in
the queue. I don't mean that as a slight in the least against the
particular maintainer of the module I'm dealing with now. But generally
speaking, I'd rather not be dependent on the maintainer if I'm in an
urgent situation. And if I can find a solution, then I can contribute
the patch, which is better still.

To answer your question, yes, I did apply the patch. However, It appears
that some of it failed, probably because the module had been modified.


-----Original Message-----
From: support-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org] On
Behalf Of Greg Knaddison - GVS
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 3:24 PM
To: support at drupal.org
Subject: Re: [support] Best way to fix a bug?

I think that's a great question and respect you for asking it.

I wrote this handbook page over a year ago: http://drupal.org/node/73179
HOWTO: Make A GOOD issue report

I'd say that your issue report lacks a good title, and (more
importantly) simple steps to repeat the issue.

Reading your issue I imagine it would take me a few hours to repeat the
bug.  Then once I repeated it fixing it might take 10 minutes.
This seems like a bad ratio

I suggest that you create a test Drupal installation on a development
server (or your local desktop) and then take as few steps as possible
until the problem happens again.  Then do it again with slightly
different settings until you can isolate the exact conditions that cause
it.  Record those steps in the issue starting with "Install Drupal" and
ending with "Condition X happens and I'd like it to be condition Y".

Once you've done that it will be easy (or easier) to fix the problem and
the module maintainer will be more likely to fix the problem.

Another potentially useful document (after you've improved the issue
itself) is the page on "Getting a Bug Fixed Sooner"
http://drupal.org/node/73178

Regards,
Greg

PS Did you reapply the patch after upgrading to drupal5?

--
Greg Knaddison
Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com
World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg
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