Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Recommended builds anyone?

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mhebsacker:
Yes, bad tester might be, but what if I'm very happy features whise since quite a while, am very happy to have a far better replacement to the original iRiver Firmware (gapless playback beeing the most serious issue), and all I'm looking forward to is to get rid of the last bugs of what is already on my player?

My motivation to try a new build is very low as long as I always have the risk to just download new bugs instead of having old ones fixed, even if the new bugs are accompanied by new features I don't need.  I simply want to listen to music and not observe another different strange behaviour of my device.

So I'd very motivated to provide feedback and test every other build in a feature freeze phase, but somehow completly lost interest to download and test builds with new bits added every day after I figured out that after the features freeze was liftet problems I'd with the new builds where increasing instead of decreasing (and yes, I deleted preferences a.s.o.) which was when I reverted to an old build and stayed with it.  This was a completly different picture than in the first half of this year, where I'd the impression that new builds had a tendenci to work better.

This probably is completly different for developers, I understand that improoving a software feature wise is far more interesting than bug hunting. If the developers are happy to develop Rockbox only for themselves and are not interested in users it's there right to do so.

Regards;

Matthias

Llorean:
If you provide accurate feedback on how to reproduce bugs, you can help get them fixed. If you download a new version, see that it has new bugs (regardless of whether or not it's fixed the old ones) and go back to your old build, those bugs may never get fixed simply because they may not affect everyone else (or better still, too many people chose to ignore them and roll back instead of actually caring about helping fix them.)

There are a lot of developers who do strive to fix bugs, the problem is there are VERY few good bug reports. During a feature freeze, the ONLY bug reports are about old bugs. During this period, most people are either doing what you're doing (avoiding new bugs by holding back) or simply updating to a newer version every day and hoping the bug goes away, rather than filing a proper report with instructions to reproduce. If you look at the bug tracker, very few filings contain useful information. And in the last 14 days, there have been a whole 4 bugs filed.

Your complaint seems to be about the lack of bugs being fixed, but many bugs aren't experienced by everyone, and developers CANNOT fix bugs they don't know about. With people refusing to take the chance that there will be new bugs in their builds, or not bothering to report them (you seem to have claimed to encountered several new bugs, how many of them have bug reports filed explaining how to reproduce them?), how are developers expected to know that these bugs are there to be fixed?

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