Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years | Hacker News Reader

Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years

moniker.net

92 pointslenidot20 comments

What a wonderful insight into the gritty world of open-source software. Scratch that, "software that is used externally" is more fitting. I find that the most offensive (in that we should improve and fix the issue) waste of time at my company is when we are treading water during the back and forth communication to a customer while trying to solve a bug. Lack of log files, reproductions, use cases, version numbers, environment details, etc. Don't forget time zone differences, introducing a very painful days latency.

It isn't our customer's fault - some inside have championed for a product feature that creates a "bug report bundle" containing useful details that will assist the debugging developer at my company. Since the product deals with sensitive customer data, this feature has been deemed a non-starter. Does anybody know how to streamline this particular process where sensitive data is involved? It is like trying to drive blind in a woefully slow car!

We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the environment on a crash and sends it to us (like Google Breakpad does). On the other hand it opens a whole can of worms if accidentally a private key is sent. Encryption is no solution in this case; the data still is stored somewhere which could be compromised. It's very hard to automatically collect diagnostic data without potentially collecting sensitive data...

Yep, the zindus addon has this problem. Very hard (impossible?) to do something automatic and risk free.

I'm not happy with the answer that I settled on with zindus: http://zindus.com/i/reporting-bugs because there is a lot of sensitive information in a logfile.

Even when someone gives permission and sends you a logfile, if there is sensitive data it creates a maintenance burden on your end to deal with it appropriately.

One (not very good) idea: pass the diagnostic data through some sort of anonymizer. Unappetizing because it would involve a lot of work and would need heuristics that could only be learned through trial and error.

Sorry non native english speaker and this confused me a bit "others are operation-based synchronizer"

Is it that they only sync with a button push or something and you fetch stuff when content changes on server ?

I'm a native english speaker and I have no idea what that means either.

If I were to guess, I'd say operation based synchronisation is based on syncing user actions and then executing them on the other side to catch up. E.g., user deleted record 23. User added a record with this data. User changed this field to be this new value.

An operation-based synchronizer is a synchronizer which sends just the changes (the "operations") to the server, rather than the whole new state. So if I add a line of text to something, then it would send back a message to the server saying "this line of text was added".

Presumably, a state-based synchronizer sends the entire updated state every time, but I don't know offhand.

See slide #5 onwards of:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/harmonyslides-2003...

It explains the terms and explores the pros and cons of each approach.

I am maintaining Gmvault (http://www.gmvault.org) and unfortunately I have the same issue. I get frustrated because I spend most of the time supporting users. It is good but I have plenty of ideas that I would like to implement in subsequent versions and I do not progress.

I would like to attract developers to help me. Which channel is the best in your opinion to do that ? I use Github so the source is available and the open issues are also public there.

Where would you advertise the need for help to be sure to find some somebody ?

A big ad on gmvault.org ?

One technique for reducing customer support email is to write extensive documentation. Whenever I get a specific question more than once, I'll add the answer to the docs. It turns out that most customers read the docs before emailing, and in my experience it is extremely rare to get questions that are answered in the docs -- and if, I can just send them a link.

Very informative post. Thanks.

Was the email analysis put together with various scripts or did you use something that can output this if given access to archived email?

Just scripts.

Wouldn't be super hard to make the analyzer more generic.

What would you use it for?

Your website is blocked by McAfee's web filter as malicious.

RyJones, do they give you a "if you believe this is an error url?"

this thread details the whitelisting process.

https://community.mcafee.com/message/240277

X11 isn't an OS.. although it might as well be.

Meanwhile I'm waiting patiently for Wayland

very interesting post , thanks!

your website forces a certain zoom on my mobile browser and does not let me zoom out so the text is unnaturally huge and images are cutoff at one side... :(

This has a lot of lessons for marketing commercial software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com