16. Fixing bugs by not fixing them at all

With the current complexity of the software, having lots of unfixed bugs shouldn't be a major concern. All the publicly-available Bugzillas are not there to show you how weak is the open-source software; on the contrary, they allow you for a better interaction with the developers. The fact that Microsoft and Oracle don't have any bug tracking system open to the public does not mean their products have fewer bugs.

There are however some questionable reactions to some particular bugs.

Let's take a popular media player for KDE: Kaffeine. For a long while, it was the default media player in many distributions, including Mandriva. Then it stopped being the default in Mandriva. The reason? An old bug that allowed Kaffeine to crash Konqueror under certain circumstances.

Thread-safe or not, a good design of Konqueror should not allow it to crash when a child process is going stray. Any crash of Kaffeine should be tolerated by Konqueror, otherwise that means it follows the Windows approach: when Explorer crashes, everything goes wild.

Things can be even worse. At some point, I managed to make Kaffeine crash the whole X server with a beta version of Kubuntu, which is definitely something that should never have happened with Linux (it's more like Windows Millenium Edition to me). The phenomenon stopped happening with a later update of the system, but nobody has a clue of what happened and how was it possible.

The "embedded Kaffeine crash" bug was fixed mid-February, but only in theory. The fix released with Kaffeine 0.8.4 involves the use of a modified xine that requires xcb, so the actual bug (either improper design, or improper error handling) was not fixed. Obviously, the Kaffeine you might be using proudly carries the eternal bug, and you'll have to wait until 0.8.4 will get mainstream.

Is this a good reason enough to change the default media player to KMPlayer? (Mandriva Corporate Desktop 3.0 had Totem as the media player in KDE, and I was expecting to change it to Kaffeine, but it seems KMPlayer is "more official".)

Another questionable decision was to remove Klipper from the list of the applets automatically launched with KDE, also in the latest Mandriva. Once again, it has been said that Klipper (a clipboard manager) presents a severe bug in relation with Konqueror. To avoid some unpleasant crash, it is not started by default.

Klipper is one of the small tools that make the difference when comes to KDE vs. GNOME debates. Each and every KDE user will want it started, and will most likely manually start it on systems where it's missing. The vanilla KDE starts it by default. The default KDE installations of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Fedora Core 6 have Klipper started by default. Why is then Mandriva irritating the users, while trying to avoid some rare crashes to happen?

Sweeping the dust and hiding it under the carpet is one way. Another innocent way to avoid fixing a bug is to concoct an ugly workaround, as with a printing hack in KPDF 3.5.7. Not bad from a practical point of view, but it doesn't address any bug. Nobody will ever try to fix the bug if an ugly hack is available, will they?