SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old

Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by bfgeek on Monday July 24, 2023 @12:16PM (#36850352)

Writing negative replies on bugs like this isn't constructive (like #c89).

Browser engineers have an extremely difficult job. The codebase is incredibly complex (they aren't just copying data from one system to another - it takes years to get up to speed in just a small area of the codebase) - any change (even improvements/fixes) risks breaking websites.

You might think you are complaining to a faceless organization, but in reality your really just talking to 1-2 people. Be kind. Each time an engineers gets dumped on you risk them throwing in the towel for good (engineer burnout is real), your bug will very much not be fixed then.

Engineers like fs@ are one of a kind and experts in their area. (fs@ implemented SVG favicons to Chromium for example - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=294179 ). As the web platform is so expansive there are really only a few people in the world at one time who understand various problems deeply enough to make progress on a fix.

What does help? In this particular case - if you are affected by this bug starring it helps. If you can kindly describe how this affects you - that also helps. The Chromium project actively tracks highly starred bugs. (Keep in mind the project also takes into account "gaming" the count so getting 100 people to star the bug mindlessly wont help).

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Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by fifilura on Monday July 24, 2023 @12:32PM (#36850602)

FS also co-authored the pre-chromium (presto) SVG engine in Opera so he probably has a unique perspective.

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Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by tansan on Monday July 24, 2023 @12:21PM (#36850415)

I thought fs was a legend after seeing that person work on this issue for years and having to manage so much surrounding work for this issue.

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Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by chefandy on Monday July 24, 2023 @12:46PM (#36850837)

I admittedly can be sharp in bug reports for obvious breaking bugs with companies like Adobe and Microsoft. I know what it's like from the other end— I worked as a developer for a decade, and before that, I worked in code-level support in a very large dev organization for a few years. Frankly, a lot of the shit I shoveled in support was totally justified, and sadly, the squeaky wheel does often get the grease. Often you don't even make it past support unless you become an "irate customer."

That said, it's pretty clear when you're up against an org like that, and communicating that you are angry because you are experiencing hardship from an unresolved issue in software that you license never, ever warrants personal attacks; implications that the developers are lazy, stupid, or disorganized; implications that they're maliciously withholding fixes, etc etc etc.

And beyond that, there's no excuse for being cranky in bug reports for free software or in small fora like issue reports on repos that go directly to developers, or anything like that.

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Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by bsimpson on Monday July 24, 2023 @01:01PM (#36851062)

bfgeek has been a TL on Blink for many years. Dude is speaking from his expertise.

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Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by alexanderpas on Monday July 24, 2023 @06:37PM (#36855230)

To be fair, #c89 was posted in Q4 2021, almost 2 years after the last post from the devs in Q1 2020 which said the bug would be fixed in Q1, and there was no response on an earlier request for a status update.

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Re:SVG Chromium bug is more than 10 years old by saurik on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @11:16AM (#36879112)

I dunno... that comment you linked to was clearly annoyed and not terribly useful, but I will note that it was at least funny; I got a lot of flack as a single-person maintainer of open source projects and I wouldn't have been much at all phased by that comment (and neither, it seems, was fs@) even though in my case it would have inherently been a lot more personal as I would have no one else to shift the blame to.

Regardless, the answer to that comment says that the reason why this but wasn't fixed yet is due to "priorities"... which I guess makes sense as Google would rather allocate people to working on Web Environment Integrity than bulking up the "1-2 people" you say are working on this part of the code. Remember: the large tech monopoly isn't our friend, and the people who work choose to work at one deserve our collective scorn.

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