Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeremy on September 17, 2010 at 11:28am

When you test to try and recreate these bugs do you try on vanilla machines or build environment ones? Because if always testing on the same machines your doing the build environments on or even a little work for them there may be things on there that are not for a vanilla machine following the directions on your wiki or these blogs. I know in my test cycles I always have to test on a vanilla machine, since the end users are going to be vanilla installs or should be assumed each and every time, as well as every single variant of ardupilot setups your selling now and "supporting" should be tested to make sure they respond as expected with new additions.

Honestly if the bugs are disregarded if not reproducible on your end or who ever is working on the investigation of said bug, what would posses me to want to continue pointing things out if the response is always, "well works for us" which seems to be the most common thing I hear from the ardu people.

• ▶ Reply

3D RoboticsPermalink Reply by Chris Anderson on September 17, 2010 at 11:38am

It's a good point, and the answer is that we test on the machines we have. I don't have any totally clean Win7 boxes, and everything has some dev stuff on it. This is an open source project, so everyone is a volunteer working in their spare time on whatever they have handy. As much as it would be great to have a proper corporate QA structure for the software, we're just not set up for that yet, I'm afraid. (We do have such a QA process for the hardware, of course, because that is created by a real company and the cost of bugs is higher).

We're trying to be as responsive as possible to issues filed in the repository and if you follow that you'll see that they've evaluated and cleared pretty quickly (4 or 5 just last night alone). But at the end of the day if we can't replicate the problem we can't fix it.

Finally, please note that in general the developers will pay no attention to problems reported in discussion threads. They will only evaluate problems submitted via the issue tracker. This is by policy, and reflects the need for a proper bug fix processes, as I'm sure you appreciate.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeremy on September 17, 2010 at 1:08pm

I will no longer post bugs or issues in threads and only on the issue tracker then was not aware that was the only way.

Since most of the machines your testing on have dev setups of some variant wouldnt it be good to have some people volunteer that have vanilla boxes of things and have them run some tests before a push happens? I realize this is open source, but most have some form a vanilla test box of differing OS's to test on before accepting a addition, fix, add on or whatever the change is. I have Vanilla boxes set up on the windows end from XP to Win7 so if you need a person to volunteer the boxes I can add what you want me to test to my testing procedures. To me the cost of a bug in software should be at the same cost as a hardware bug, because what good is hardware that doesnt work with the code or only works in a specific environment. So even if I report on the issue trackers what is someone suppose to do if you cant replicate the problem they have? Is it just brushed off or whats the policy for issues others have that no one on your dev team can duplicate?

Also I am sure you would get more help in fixing and or adding improvements to say the GCS if it wasnt stuck to such an insanely pricey build system.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Mather on September 17, 2010 at 1:07pm

Please note the following comments are my own. I do not speak for Chris, Jordi or any other of the Ardu team members.

From this developer's point of view it is literally not possible to try and track down every issue possible. I for one do not have a budget to run out and buy new hardware and operating systems every time something new comes out. I refuse to go to Vista and my only experience with it has been on people's system I'm trying to fix (as part of what I do for a living). I run into plenty of users that don't want to run IE for whatever reason their cousin or friend of a friend has given them. So you've got, let's see, XP, Vista, Windows 7 (we don't hear much from the pre-XP crowd any more). There's IE, Firefox and Chrome. It's up to us to make Goggle Maps and .NET work on people's systems. Then there's the emulator folks on Linux and Mac's.

So if you'd like to know how I develop things it's like this. I've got it working on XP Pro which is what I use on my computer. I'll do whatever I can to try and help people get it running on their own system with their own problems. What I will not accept is the people who demand that I drop everything and go buy the latest hardware and the latest software just because they did. It's working on my system...if it's not working on your system then maybe you should be running what I'm running and then you'd be happy like me. If you're going to be the first guy on the block to buy a 64-bit OS, you'd better believe you're going to have problems. Then you'll hear "64-bit has been around for years"...Fantastic... so has Mac and they both have about the same market share....and I don't develop for Mac.

I wrote a program called LanLights about 9 years ago. It was a program to add the network lights to Windows 95/98 when you started using a network connection instead of a modem. In 2004 I made some more revisions and posted it on my webpage for anyone to download absolutely free. Skip ahead 6 years and Windows 7 comes out without any blinky lights showing your network traffic. All of a sudden some freeware site finds my LanLights program and it gets replicated all over the Internet. I start getting a few emails a week from people (generally nice enough) who sometimes were yelling at me and complaining that I need to fix a bug in my software. That software that had been written specifically for Windows 98 and that they had downloaded for free. The issue was that it's a 32-bit program and if they have too much RAM my API call would return a long integer bigger than 32-bits. So the solution is to convert the program to .NET and recompile. So I tried the wizard. It came back with 130+ errors and then the compiler quit counting. Did I ever spend the time to re-write the program in .NET so that those angry users could download my free software and make it work with their 8 GB of memory? Nope.

What drives me nuts is the sense of entitlement that end-users seem to think they have. This is open-source code written by people (mostly for free) who are interested in this hobby. Jeremy's comments are a spit in the face for everyone who has worked on Ardu... in my opinion.

The great thing about Ardu, Jeremy, is the hardware is inexpensive and the software is free and open-source. If you don't like it, feel free to write your own or edit it any way you see fit. Then post your changes!

I don't mean to be so confrontational but Jeremy's comments struck a nerve for me.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeremy on September 17, 2010 at 1:13pm

WOW ok then HK ride that high horse Jesus! Yeah I feel so entitled my god ! I am trying to point things out and what does and does not work for me ! There is some serious attitudes on here with the ardu people and its becoming a total joke! HK if you really want a spit in the face I can share my honest opinions no holds barred then you would hear spitting in your face. I at no time said go buy more machines! Just suggestions to help better you product. And when did I say drop everything and fix this not ONCE! And yeah I was spitting so much in your face I took the time to help you with the 64 bit questions you had.

Thanks for proving its time to sell all ardu related stuff and stick with UDB as it works and never causes me the grief that Ardu does. Nor is there this attitude that oozes like yours HK !

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Mather on September 17, 2010 at 1:41pm

I do love this generalization of yours Jeremy: "Honestly if the bugs are disregarded if not reproducible on your end or who ever is working on the investigation of said bug, what would posses me to want to continue pointing things out if the response is always, "well works for us" which seems to be the most common thing I hear from the ardu people."

Really? The most common thing you hear from a bunch of people who love this project is "well it works for us (so go screw yourself)"? Really? That's a tough pill to swallow Jeremy. I could understand the statement "we cannot reproduce this bug"...that makes sense. But the dismissive "well it works for us" therefore we're not going to help you is a gross misrepresentation.

How about if you start debugging Jeremy? Everything but the GCS is written in an open-source or free developement environment. Download them and start debugging! Arduino's Processing environment and VS 2005 would be a great start.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeremy on September 17, 2010 at 1:48pm

I never said the go screw yourself part My god slow your roll for a minute take a deep breath and re read what I said. But yes I have heard that and read that a few times but not implying the go screw yourself part. And the point i said that you decided to point out is my own opinion on things there was no attack on anyone or any project. Its an honest question to me and seems like your over reacting to something that isnt there.

Why would I have offered to volunteer test machines and crap like that if I felt everything is go screw yourself? I also know and have delt with Chris going WAY WAY WAY beyond what he needed to, to help with a problem I have had in the beginning. Me stating things in a generalized way, does not mean to read in between the lines and assume I am attacking anyone or any project !!!!

I am a developer on a open source project myself, I know how it goes and what people do, hence my generalized ways of suggesting things and not pointing any fingers or anything, and again with my offering of machines to test on.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeremy on September 17, 2010 at 4:05pm

As I stated my main issue is only with the GCS... I have sorted everything else out, as this is only a thread related to the GCS I at no time said anything is grossly wrong with the ardu code, I have been using my own modified 2.7 version succesfully enough, and I am well over 100 flights with the UDB v2 and v3. If I felt there was I would have stated that as well but all I said was the GCS and noticing a couple differences between the XP and win 7 usage of the GCS and config tool. I find it funny you think I have no clue about how to work on my ardu or how to debug things.

I still think you took me way wrong and missed what my real points were. Any ways I am done with this and your gripe on my suggestions and things I have noticed. Enjoy

My apologies to Jim for this in your thread, was never my intention to piss any one off.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Mather on September 17, 2010 at 5:36pm

What I take exception to is your statement that the "Ardu people" commonly tell people to go screw themselves when they report a bug. There's no mis-reading involved. This is patently false and a despicable thing to say.

Permalink Reply by Paul Mather on September 17, 2010 at 5:27pm

Jim, here's something else to try (cut and paste from another forum)

"Double click on My Computer on your desktop, then click Local Disk C, then click Windows, then System32 Folder. In the System32 folder look for the Macromed folder. Click on it, then right-click on flash9.ocx. Click on Copy, then left click and select Paste. Now right click on that copied file and rename the file to flash.ocx Do not delete the original flash9.ocx file.
That should fix the problem. "

They are suggesting locating the file flash9.ocx or flash9b.ocx in \windows\system32\macromed\flash or C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash, make a copy and rename the copy to flash.ocx (don't delete the original file). It seems to have fixed a bunch of people's same issue in 2007. I can't say it will fix you Windows 7 64-bit issue.

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeremy on September 17, 2010 at 5:40pm

Jesus Christ HK give it a rest ! I never said what your claiming! I NEVER SAID YOU OR ANYONE HERE SAYS GO SCREW ANYONE!!!!!!!

What your saying i said was not my words read MY posts again by stating "ardu" was so not to confuse with a different AP. but yet still I never said that any one says screw anyone or anything worse than that. My god !!

And FYI what you posted was basically the same thing I told Jim to try already if you actually have read things fully and not through your eyes of being as pissed as you are !

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Mather on September 17, 2010 at 9:53pm

Honestly if the bugs are disregarded if not reproducible on your end or who ever is working on the investigation of said bug, what would posses me to want to continue pointing things out if the response is always, "well works for us" which seems to be the most common thing I hear from the ardu people.

These are your words. Word for word. They say what I have claimed. I think your statements are false and pathetic.

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page