Beyond Help.

I'm a big fan of open source software. I do most of my work on Linux and most of my programming is done using Perl. I believe that open software has value and the more open our infrastructure is, the better it is for the world as a whole.

As programmers go, I'm pretty good at what I do. That gives me certain obligations, one of which is to give back to the open software movement when I can.

I was given an opportunity today, but I don't think I'll be giving back in this case.

As I mentioned before, I do a lot of programming in Perl. Sometimes I need to create windows and buttons to make my programs pretty. Enter GTK2. It's a really nice package. For what I do it's simple, reasonably clean and you can usually find an example out there that will give you a good head start. Therein lies the rub.

The example that I found was part of the GTK2-Perl Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) list. I copied it over and tried to run it. No go. The example was using an older version of the library and it had a typo. If only there were a programmer in the house!

Hey! I'm a programmer! And I'm in the house! It took me less that 15 minutes to get it up and running. Yay me!

Now comes the obligation part. I'm using public code, so therefore I'm obligated to send the fixes in to the GTK2-Perl folk so the next person who comes along doesn't have to figure it out. I connect to their bug tracker and try to enter a bug report, including the fix.

No dice! If you want the privilege of submitting a bug to them, you have to sign up to their web site. That's stupid but I'll bite the bullet for betterment of open sourceyness. I'm quite the patriot.

Nope. You not only have to sign up, but you have to give them an email address. Oh, and they'll publish your email address guaranteeing that you'll get spammed off the planet! It gets worse. They suggest creating a throwaway account to handle the spamming. What? Why would I set up an account just to throw it away?

In theory this is supposed to discourage spamming. Is spamming in bug reports really that big a marketing vector? Hey, my program is crashing, maybe penis enhancement will help!

I know that people want an automated system here. One that will block all spam without human intervention. These people are idiots. You have 2 choices. Get casual bug reports that will do wonders for enhancing your project while dealing with the reality of spamming, or set up barriers that will keep most spam out and will do wonders for causing inbreeding on your project.

I'll admit I don't have a lot of patience for this nonsense. I'm not jumping through hoops to help you. Besides, a better solution is trivial.

Any bug report sent via the "outside" gets put in a queue until someone who's trusted takes a look at it. Spam bug reports are rare and there are more than enough regulars on any project who will do the few seconds of grunt work for you.

You could also use a one time key. I connect to your bug tracker. You email me a tracker-putter-inner-key. You don't keep my email address, you just use it once to send me the key. I then use that key to submit the bug report. If I need to add comments to that report, then I use the number again. If I loose the number and want to add more comments then I have to sign up for an account and I become a regular user.


As for the moral obligation to open source? Here it is:

In the GTK2-Perl FAQ, question 5.3, "Show me a simple example for Drag-n-Drop" you need to make 4 changes to get it to work under Perl, v5.10.0 and GTK2 version 1:1.221-4.

1. Replace "Gtk2::Ex::Simple::List" with "Gtk2::SimpleList". It occurs in 3 places, all near the top.
2. In the function "_move_from_to", change "for my $i (0 .. $#{ @{$fromlist->{data}}) {" to "for my $i (0 .. $#{$fromlist->{data}}) {".
3. Enjoy!
   

If someone wants to send this to the GTK2-Perl bug site, feel free, but watch out for the spam.