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Unity 3.51: still in beta with these bugs

Discussion in 'Developer Preview Archive' started by _rem, Apr 12, 2012.

  1. jlevel

    jlevel

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    The actual bug system is useless and prehistoric. Why don't use something like Bugzilla? Or Mantis BT?
    If there is a need of NDA on attachments just add an option to make them privates, but only the attachments. We need to search on bug tracker, add comments and see issue status.

    If someone reports a lot of critical bugs then reward them. Give to him free upgrades, coupons, free beer, women, the possibilities are infinite.

    Anyway, we will be ignored again and nothing will change
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2012
  2. Baroni

    Baroni

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  3. jlevel

    jlevel

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  4. Tiles

    Tiles

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    I can`t vote, my ten vote points are gone. That`s another dinosaur. Only 10 suggestion points per person.
     
  5. n0mad

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    How come I didn't know it existed ? Voted.

    Also :

    I wouldn't be so rude as I still feel much respect for Unity's Team overall work. But I have to share the same stupefaction. I wouldn't expect such a QA validation strategy from such a big (popularity speaking) company as Unity Tech. I worked for a company which provided frontend backend applications/tools, where framework stability was critical if they didn't want to produce up to 1 million euro public tresory loss under a month. I just can't picture QA saying to CEO : "Sorry, I can't reproduce that big bug, let's put it on a lower priority" :p

    Of course it's harder without a precise configuration of Unity framework, but (no offense), let's remind that it is just that : a configuration of your framework, Unity.
    It's not like we were hackers who just reverse-engineered your engine and rewrote some low-level functions. We're just using the tools you gave us in various ways, so if we (at least) provide a concise procedure about how to reach such a precise configuration, I can't see how it would be more "deniable" than an already configured one.

    Anyway, it's quite a complex problem I admit. That's why a public bug tracker would be a good step forward.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2012
  6. jlevel

    jlevel

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    That's true.

    Let's put an example: any GNU/Linux distro or the Linux kernel itself. Which is a lot bigger and complex project than Unity3D.

    Can you imagine if for any bug they say "Hey! Send me your full GNU/Linux distribution with all the packages, sources and all your data installed on your machine, or we can't debug it and it will be considered as lower priority or maybe ignored". Completely insane.

    Just for this reason the use of a public bug tracker is justified.

    As l0cke said, tracking bugs without customer data is how rest of the world does it.
     
  7. rextr09

    rextr09

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  8. flim

    flim

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    I understood why the Developer Preview section still here, because 3.5 still under development ;)
    And Unity is the only engine I know which lack a bug forum or tracker. Maybe UT afraid bug hurt sales? That is a sign of lack of confidence of their product.
     
  9. kablammyman

    kablammyman

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    me too.

    lets fix the basics unity! A good bug tracking system can be a great start to fixing the broken basics!
     
  10. jlevel

    jlevel

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    I'm wondering if number of votes has any real effect, because if you browse each planned / started or completed project much of them has less votes, and curiously some other projects with a lot of higher votes doesn't have any response.
     
  11. jlevel

    jlevel

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    As we can see, we are ignored again. I think it's time to be more proactive and make something to change this behaviour, we can't stay idly and being ignored after buy a commercial product which doesn't fit the expectations they promised.

    Maybe for a company spend $2000 isn't too much, but for an indie really it's a lot of money.

    Months ago I submitted a bug report, I received a reply that developers was working on my case. I informed this bug was probably caused by a memory leak, and I stayed patient a lot of months waiting for a fix. I emailed them every month asking for news, the result was the same: from QA told me developers was working on it and no solution yet. The other day I received an email from developer, they told me my bug maybe was caused by a memory problem but they don't had time to track it down. So, If they don't have time to track this, how it's supposed they are working on this case?? What did all these months when from QA they said me they are working on this case?? They are just replying what I already said on first time. SHAME.

    If you follow forums posts you will see a lot of suggestions to improve Unity, simple example: open a bug tracker. All requests are being ignored. Being ignored It's really what we want? I don't think so. Also, we don't have any release date plan for new fixes/versions, so we don't know what they are doing and some features doesn't work correctly.

    For this reason, I propose to spread the voice outside this forum.

    Post the actual situation on reddit, twitter, and send our voice to specialized blogs, or no solution will be taken.

    Also, we can contact every asset creator to remove their assets from asset store until this situation changes.

    I propose to meet us on IRC, irc.freenode.org #unity3d to discuss the ways to take and finish a detailled document which will be send to mass media.

    That's the unique way they start to take us seriously and stop playing with us. They are not an amateur company, for this reason these mistakes cannot be overlooked.

    We want a robust product, if have critical bugs just announce it and we don't upgrade.
     
  12. rextr09

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    I think they don't open an issue tracker because they kinda like to surprise us with new features, or (and most probably) they have thousands of open issues and hundreds of them have not been read or touched at all.
     
  13. newlife

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    As i told to a unity guys more than 1 year ago, they should absolutely update Unity EVERY MONTH like UDK and Crytek do with their engine, instead of deploying 1 release per year.
     
  14. l0cke

    l0cke

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    Same experience here. What about making something like www.unity3dbugs.com and put there list of ignored bugs, write few articles about unity (non)stability, not working features (OC...), huge problems with larger projects, whole bug fixing attitude (send us your project or ignored) and let do google rest of job....

    For our company Unity3D is HUGE disappointment and I am not mentioning financial loss caused by migration project to another (stable) platform.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2012
  15. flim

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    Could you introduce which (stable) platform you switched to? If it is not convenient to tell in forum please PM me. Many Thanks!
     
  16. newlife

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    You may want to know that i wrote to David Helgason (Unity3D CEO) and tell him about 3.5.1 malcontent.
    This is his reply:

    "Thanks for reaching out. We are all too aware of having bugs in Unity and I'm an avid reader of this thread as well as other critical ones. We are constantly working on bugfix releases, and while we don't expect to ever be bug-free, we expect to always be in a pendulum between adding new things and fixing old bugs."
     
  17. n0mad

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    Hats off to David, then ;)
     
  18. droderick

    droderick

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    it is nice that David has responded.
    Our main concern is the lack of documentation of existing bugs. Having spent the last 3 years making applications for exhibits/trade shows, we have spent many a dollar debugging things in Unity, sometimes it is our own code, other times it is a non-documented bug.

    Maybe the community should have a public bug repository on the wiki. As a community, we could come up with a standard way of reporting, verifying and documenting said bugs. Thoughts?
     
  19. Metron

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    It'll be shut down faster than you can say "bugreport". Unity, at it's current state, doesn't have any interest in having floating around a public bug list which would pull off a lot of users (even if they aren't directly concerned by the bug itself).

    While I'm not ok with Unity's currently release 1-2 times per year and "we don't know when we release the fix for this bug" politics along with their "post us your repro-project or you'll be ignored" thingy, I can understand why they behave this way: It's not an easy thing to satisfy this huge amount of wanna-be developers... so they concentrate on the serious ones. And those are willing to produce more than a simple bug report entry with some unclear text...
     
  20. Tiles

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    Hm, cannot fully agree here. The "serious", means professional developers are the ones where time is money. And that`s the ones who will rarely submit bug reports. Because time is money. And creating a proper bug report and uploading it costs time.

    On the positive side, my last bug submissions all gots answered and told to be fixed in the next release. So there has something changed. Fingers crossed that it lasts. And i would really wish to have a faster release cycle to get the bugfixes then.
     
  21. WarbladerToo

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    I'm confused! What is the latest version of Unity? 3.5.1 or 3.5.1f2 or 3.5.2f2? On the web page under Unity/Whats new it say Unity 3.5.1, if I go to about Unity in the editor it say 3.5.1f2. Why can't you (Unity company) also state what the latest build version (or what ever that 1f2 code is) is on the web page too? And maybe send out an email to all registered developers when a new version is uploaded. I did not get an email when the latest version was released! (Pro version + Pro iPhone version)
     
  22. Tiles

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    There is a check for updates button in the Editor in the Help menu. And there you can also check what your current installed version is, with the About Unity button.
     
  23. _rem

    _rem

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    Hello !
    I'm sorry, I have a lot of work lately and I board not sent my bug report with my simplified project. I will try to send it this weekend.
    But I am still convinced that the problem with "Occlusion Culling" is not only related to my project.:cool:
     
  24. superpig

    superpig

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    Serious developers aren't put off by bug lists; they're encouraged by them, because it makes risk a lot easier to calculate. (Or to put it another way: if their attitude is such that they'd rather use an engine with undisclosed bugs than one with a public bug list, then it's likely that they'll fail).

    It's not about the number of bugs. If Unity only had 1 bug, but it was a bug that crippled a feature that I'm dependent on, then I'll still use another engine. If it's a bug that I only discover after six months of development, and when I tell Unity they say "yeah we knew about that, we'll fix it some day," then I won't just use a different engine, I'll also leave thinking that Unity are timewasters and tell everyone else as such.

    We've been lucky so far that the "known" issues we've run into haven't been critical to our game, or we've been able to work around them, e.g. lightmapped geometry not casting shadows on dynamic objects. It's fair enough that such things aren't supported - Unity have a limited number of engineers and an unlimited number of things for them to do - but I could really have done without spending two days trying to figure out why I wasn't getting any shadows.

    Back under 2.6.1 I did start a wiki page on UnifyCommunity that tried to enumerate the known issues, but nobody else contributed. Still, I think it's a good idea. And I don't think Unity would be able to shut it down, anyway.
     
  25. newlife

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    I wrote back to David Helgason (Unity CEO):

    > Hello David,
    > Thank you very much for your reply.
    > Do you have a plan on when fix major 3.5.1 issues (memory leak and lower performance)?

    His reply:

    We're working on it. Fixing bugs is something of an unbounded problem so as usual I can't promise a date, but it won't be many months.
     
  26. WarbladerToo

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    I know about that... I just want them to be more concise (if that is the correct word) with their info. So that they show the same version info on their webpage, because I didn't get any info on the 3.5.1f2 version when that was released (even from inside the editor). I discovered there was a new version out by pure chance, when I was going through some forum thread. How hard could it be to put a version number and/or build number on the webpage with also a release date.
     
  27. droderick

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    Superpig, very nice way of stating all of this.

    I'd definitely be interested in helping out with a known issues list on the wiki. I also feel that if it is done in a responsible, respectful manner then Unity would not shut such a thing down. I believe we and others would contribute with hopes that we'd all save ourselves and others hours and money. Super, pm me if you'd like to continue the conversation.
    d
     
  28. newlife

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    this time i have been more "outspoken".


    > David,
    > good to know. What do you think about a public web site about Unity bugs and known issues? I think that will be very useful for users and very appreciated.
    > By the way, i would like to know if you knew about 3.5.1 issues (memory leak and lower performance) when you released it.

    his reply:

    I am not sure – if we were I would guess that we decided to go ahead and get some critical fixes out, but I simply don't know. Sometimes "knowing" is also an elastic concept – we know of many bugs, but not always of their severity and who's affected by them.

    Sorry if your project is affected and we are working hard on this all.

    David Helgason, CEO
    Unity Technologies
     
  29. taumel

    taumel

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    First i wrote something, antenna tree would have loved this one, as i guess it was witty in his opinion, i deleted this one, sorry dude.

    Then i wrote something new which i would have considered as being honest, serious, intelligent, well structured and at the same time respectful but it didn't sound a lot after me, it more gave me the impression that my account was hacked, so i deleted this one too.

    I could dance a bit but then again i'm kind of tired, so, just a bye must be enough for today.
     
  30. jlevel

    jlevel

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    If Unity CEO is aware of these posts, I'm wondering why he don't post nothing here and solve all the questions of this thread.

    This could be done in less than 5 minutes.
     
  31. Tiles

    Tiles

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    Because then it would be an official statement, and he could be nailed at it ;)
     
  32. newlife

    newlife

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    I agree with you
     
  33. newlife

    newlife

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    I asked David Helgason what he thinks about a public web site with Unity bugs and known issues.
    He replayed "It's a good idea, though so far we've decided it was too much effort compared to actually fixing the bugs, but it might happen at some point."
    So i think that we can do it by ourself.
    What do you think?
     
  34. jlevel

    jlevel

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    In my opinion, I don't think we have to do their job for free and lose more time.

    Anyway, I'm tired of lack of support from Unity, after all these months nothing has changed, so I'm switching my project to UDK engine, which is more mature and take their job seriously.

    Bye Unity.
     
  35. Tiles

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    A shame that he hasn`t understood yet that this would be the more time saving solution for everybody. No more sorting of thousands bugreport submissions for the same bug. Plus it would bring more satisfied users. In the end it`s Unity`s decision. All we can do is ask for it.

    This will not work. You can`t know what bugs gets worked at, and what bugs are already fixed. Because it is not directly connected to Unity and its devs.

    Pressure is the only language businessmen really understands. To do their job for them is no pressure but a relief, which makes the need for a change even smaller. What could help is to stop posting bugs by the bugtracking system. And post every bug report directly here in this forum. In best case one bug gets reported by thousands of people at once, flooding the forum. But this will not happen neither i fear.
     
  36. superpig

    superpig

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    That would be fine if they were actually fixing the bugs at a satisfactory rate.

    (Edit: figured I should clarify a bit). I don't mean that I think the UT engineers are just lazily sitting around doing nothing - I know that's not true. But at the end of the day UT have a limited number of people; they are never going to fix all the bugs and they have to prioritize. If they fix a bug that's affecting 70% of people, then great, but it doesn't help me if I'm in the 30% who have different problems. So by "actually fixing the bugs" I really mean my bugs (or your bugs, or his bugs, etc).
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2012
  37. superpig

    superpig

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    Not true: we are told which bugs have been fixed in the release notes for a new version. And really, until that new version comes out, what difference does it make which bugs are being worked on inside Unity?

    I think this would be a very bad idea. It'd kill the usefulness of the forum for everybody else, and it would only make it harder for Unity to actually fix the bugs.
     
  38. Tiles

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    Sure, that`s what a boycott is made for. To produce a bit trouble and to give a bit of a decision help ;)

    On the other hand, what about a bugsection at the forum where users can talk about bugs and workarounds? I`ve seen this concept at other software before. And there it worked good. That would be some kind of a public bug tracker, without really being a public bug tracker. And would definitely make less work. And would make a few users more happy. A win win situation. At the moment such threads about Unity bugs sinks in the masses of other posts. And gets as fast forgotten as they got written.

    But the list would never be the one from the Unity devs. They surely get a ton of reports about bugs that we will never see and never hear from. Unity devs would ignore this external hobby list because it differs anyways. Means the only useful part of such an external bugtracker would be to blow off a bit steam. And it`s too much work for just that.

    By the way, who would maintain such a bugtracker? Who will spend all his time for free to go through thousands of reports per day? Who pays the server bills? Unity has the resources anyways, they already deal with the stuff.
     
  39. AcidArrow

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    The problem with public bugtrackers is the attached scenes. Not everyone makes new testcases for the bugs they report and sometimes just post the project they are working for. That being available for view for everyone is obviously a problem.
     
  40. AcidArrow

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    Repeat after me, "all software have bugs". Some have really severe ones, others less so. Really severe ones are those that flat out stop you from being able to do what you want. For example consistent and frequent crashes. Unity doesn't really have those. Right now Unity's bugs are sort of "things are not optimized enough" and not the "I absolutely cannot use this" kind.

    I'm not saying I don't want bugs fixed. I do. I want all the bugs in the bugtracker to be fixed yesterday. I'm just trying to put some perspective here.
     
  41. superpig

    superpig

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    Marking bugs/bug attachments as private is not difficult to implement, if the bug tracker's any good.

    You can't back any of that up, because there's no public bug tracker. You literally have no way of knowing how many people have hit showstopper bugs - not least because the only reasonable response to such a bug is to find a way around it or to change scope such that you're not blocked by it. We're not seeing a crowd of people sitting around waiting for the bugs to be fixed because when you're trying to ship a game you don't sit around waiting. You change what you're trying to do, or you switch engine. People definitely do both of those things sometimes.

    Maybe in your experience, you've not run into anything big. Good for you. But as you say, all software has bugs, and the same logic that leads to that conclusion also leads to the conclusion that you can't tell what the severity of those bugs are. (I, for one, do get frequent crashes - though granted they're usually out-of-memory conditions, which a public bug DB wouldn't help much with).
     
  42. n0mad

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    Superpig got a strong point here, imo.
     
  43. NTDC-DEV

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    Just to put into perspective a possible reason he says it will take too long;

    (taken from a little gem of a blog post: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/10/21/build-engineering-and-infrastructure-how-unity-does-it/)

    Which essentially means they have to change their bug-tracking system and link it with their VCS + all the compatibility issues. The fact is, we don't exactly know what Unity is thinking.

    I think we just have to get their attention on the fact that if they don't make the bug-tracker at least partially public, on the long run they will get more and more frustrated customers. Fact is, Unity is still aimed at amateur / indie customers who don't pay for "enhanced" support. Their main value of democratization isn't reflected in the way they handle bugs and thus will have a lot more issues with customers than, for say, UDK.
     
  44. BigBulle

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    You are right, the bugs are not 100% consistent, and that's a pity, but as soon as you have big scenes that uses more than 3Gb of ram, then the crashes are becoming really frequent.
    When the only information in the unity log is 'Crash !!!' it is quite frustrating (and quite embarrasing when you are in front of your graphic designers ^^).

    The lack of clear log error messages and the inability of using Unity dll's inside unit tests make the developement process really slow and too unpredictable for a professional use.

    We are investigating to integrate Unity in a continuous intergration process considering some unsupported free tools like SharpUnit, but we are certainly investigating to switch to some other 3D engine.

    We would be really glad to pay the professsional lisense a lot more in order to get a stable product.
    And finally, we don't have the time to maintain a public bug tracker, especially if it's not an open source project.

    Regards
     
  45. newlife

    newlife

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    I think that the best thing Unity can do in order to improve this situation, even more than creating a public bug tracker, is to schedule a release EVERY MONTH, not every year, like UDK and Crytec are doing since years.
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2012
  46. Metron

    Metron

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    Second this... The issues I discussed with Unity are (citation) "[...] fixed, but we don't know yet when it will be released [...]" (or if it will make into the next release). I'm currently investigating how my game would perform by changing the game style entirely (from 2.5D platformer to 3D 3rd person)... but if this fails I'm surely switching engine...
     
  47. NTDC-DEV

    NTDC-DEV

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    Unity seems to have heard you:

    http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/05/08/testing-unity/

    Interesting section about Tools Community:

     
  48. Metron

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    Well... let's see... I start to believe when I start to see...
     
  49. n0mad

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    That's very good news, and thanks to Unity to have reacted so fast (as the general bugtracker complaint only appeared recently).
    I salute the initiative. Although, as Metron, I won't judge until the thing is real.
     
  50. l0cke

    l0cke

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    Not true. Once you have bigger project, crashes are very frequent (out of memory), especially actions which "browse" through project. Importing assets, turning support of meta files on, switching between bigger scenes after play, various asset server crashes, etc...

    I am not mentioning performance problems in 3.5+, Umbra still not working properly - after two years. I really dont understand what is going on there, implementing Umbra in any existing engine is matter of cca 2 days (download trial SDK and try yourself). Btw, why Unity offers very crippled version of Umbra? Full umbra is 10x more powerfull (dynamic oclussion, incremental rebaking...).

    From the unity blog:

    ...We have the testable product, we have the infrastructure and we have the need. Were we to make a single cycle product, and then move on to the next, we would not be taking such a bet on automation, but features in Unity live for years and repeated manual testing on such a product simply doesn’t make sense.

    Use the community

    We have you guys.


    So message is IMHO clear. We will not try to do any serious testing, we are testing on you guys. Why to bother to do for example automatic tests (hard work), if we have you? Well, you paid for licence and you expect working product? Who cares....

    Personally I have nothing against testing on community, but this is totally wrong approach. In such case each beta must be public, there must be working bug tracking system, bugs must be solved, not ignored. Whole "send us your project or ignored" attitude is shame. You dont want to employ testers and develop automated tests? OK, but then hire far more people for bug fixing and use community well. You can do it one way, or other, but nothing in between.
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2012