I love Open Source, don't get me wrong. Since I've migrated to Linux, I've been able to do WAY more for cheaper. I've also been able to do things I wouldn't have ordinarily been able to do.
But...the community has an achilles heel: who do you go to to track down a problem?
Right now, on my work box, I'm getting sporadic crashes in both Firefox and SciTE. I really like SciTE. It's a great editor for code. It's not a full IDE or anything, but you can compile, find errors, grep, etc. It's customizable and fairly quick.
Anyway, these crashes occur with the following message to a console (after having run it from there):
[flynn@mir ioTester]$ The program 'SciTE' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)'.
(Details: serial 8701290 error_code 1 request_code 0 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)
So, it's an X thing. Apparently. The thing is, the app didn't change, the X code must have during a yum update. And also, I haven't really seen this bug at home, which is running almost exactly the same setup. So, I posted to the FedoraForums about it. I found a thread where someone was getting crashes with Firefox, so I piggybacked on that thread. Problem is, it was just me and this other guy chatting about it.
Where do I go to find the answer? Fedora? The repo lists? Xorg? SciTE? GTK people? I have a hard time narrowing the problem. I've jumped on the SciTE list because I think they'll have the best chance of finding it, but to do that I have to run the app in a debugger, and it's kinda hard to do that when you're trying to work.
Years ago, I had an argument with a good friend of mine about why I didn't like reusable code. The problem I had was that you counted on a myriad of layers that you flat out didn't understand. If something went wrong, you were in the dark. In principle, Open Source solves that problem, but I'm not good enough to dig into X window code, nor do I have the time to learn about it. So, I'm forced to hope that whatever problem is there will fix itself with FC7 -- sorry -- Fedora 7.
Posted by flynn at May 25, 2007 1:58 PM