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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

My only experience with GNUStep is that 10 years ago, as a student, I needed to port a random CLI Cocoa app (that a different student wrote to learn Cocoa) to GNUStep.

There was a weird bug that took me forever to debug… and in the end, it was caused by some horrible bug in some map structure (NSDictionary? I think?) where a NSString unicode key did not map to the same value every time. Quite basic stuff. (It worked fine on Mac.)

As a student I didn’t really know how to report bugs, so I didn’t; I just wondered how did nobody catch it until now; but I just thought that probably nobody really uses GNUStep so that’s why.

It’s just anecdotal and I don’t really have access to the code anymore so I cannot tell you the details. (the original code was far from perfect too, maybe it was some unicode weirdness.)

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…didn’t really know how to report bugs, so I didn’t; I just wondered how did nobody catch it until now

Basically, that’s how.

You made think about digging old hard drives and trying to figure out where are all the files from 2013 again… I think I could find the actual underlying issue much faster now.

But, is it really worth the time?

Yes! It is worth it - please do :)

My personal experience mirrors yours. I remember when Swift announcement from Apple came that the main author of GNUStep (sorry I forgot the name) announced an open source impl the same day. My thoughts back then: „maybe make the last effort actually usable before jumping to the next big project“.

But I don‘t want to downplay the work and time put into this project. I would simply not use it in any project because of the number of compatibility bugs that haunts the project.

I used the project in production via Apportable’s crosscompile solution to port iOS native apps to android.

This is my experience using open source in general, as a developer (who mostly uses open source).

Go to GitHub and file a reproducible issue. In this case it might be “here’s a shell loop that runs a test 10 times. On my system it fails about 40 perfect of the time”

Not complaining about moderation but I do wonder why someone would disagree with the advice above.

That’s concerningly bad luck, or an exaggeration. The entire Internet, hell, technology as we know it, operates on the premise that a bunch of open source code works ‘pretty well’.

It does work "pretty well" after you discover all of the quirks thorugh trial and error and then work around them :)

Can you list some references to bad software you are using perhaps? Someone else who also uses open source software might be able to suggest a different tool or fix you may of not known about.

Every software will be bad software if you use it often enough to the point you step into some specific usage that developer and tester never imagine about.

The point isn't whether it is good or bad. The point is nobody use it like that thus nobody knows it would break.

The good thing about open source software in general is: if you complain and give a detailed procedure of how it happens, there is much higher chance somebody might looks into it (or yourself if you will). Closed source software in the other end: good luck, find a workaround if you hope or just stuck with it.

That's why I'm asking what I'm asking, but Open Source is also not guaranteed to be funded.

Plenty of funded proprietary closed-source software are plagued with bugs too

The keyword here is 'much higher'. It is of course not guaranteed. As a developer, if somebody already done the trouble shooting or even root cause finding for you. You are more likely to fix the bug first because it will only cost you a little time compares to other completely non-investigated error report. And that also benefit the users because they got the bug affecting them fixed earlier. This don't happen in closed source softwares.

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