Whose bug is it anyway?

[the dsc]

I'm not sure to whom I should report certain bugs, to the program developers, or to the WM developers. More confusion if plugins are involved.

Flash, in opera, behaves quite bad on openbox, but in fluxbox it's substantially better (usable). I don't know about KDE or GNOME. So, whose bug is it, openbox', opera's or flash's?

Conversely, chrome's and chromium's flash will behave badly on fluxbox (and somewhat similarly to flash's problems on opera under openbox!), but almost perfectly on openbox, it will just "go crazy" sometimes playing videos, but all you need to do is to kill flash (just flash) and reload the page, or even open and close the part where flash would be shown (like individual items on google reader), and it will work normally again. This case isn't much of a problem of bug "ownership" because fluxbox is, sadly, discontinued, as far as I know.

The develpment version of gimp, 2.7, again, behaves somewhat strangely with openbox, regarding window management, while gimp 2.6 was normal as 2.7 is in fluxbox. Gimp's or openbox' bug?

At some point specific distributions may have something to do with the bugs too, I was forgetting that point.

Would be interesting if there were a sort of "unified" bug report place, where developers from all the involved software could decide whose "fault" it is and exchange the bits of information they may have on how to solve it universally. I think that otherwise, bugs being solved more independently, could produce collateral bugs somewhere else, I guess. Like using an hypothetical fluxbox' fix for opera's flash problems on openbox culminating in the problems that chrome has with flash on fluxbox. But hopefully developers have something more or less organized to deal with this sort of contingencies, I can't be the first person to think of that, but still, I'd like to know whom to report the bugs to in this sort of situation. "Everyone" involved? Well, at least the main suspects I guess, as I hardly can track the cause of a problem to some obscure library that is at some point used by some program or WM.

[reed9]

Regarding flash, it's well known to be buggy, especially under linux, and given its proprietary nature, I doubt there's too much developers can or would do. Ultimately, I would complain to Adobe, and perhaps they'll get on the ball with better linux support.

Otherwise, it depends on how exactly something is failing. You could always submit a bug for both openbox and GIMP.

The idea of a central bug tracker has long been discussed. It's difficult to get thousands of individual people and projects organized and on board with such a thing, though.

[the dsc]

Hopefully flash will soon be obsolete with the spread of html5, that should make things less buggy. Unless IE 9 comes with his own "version" of html interpretation and screws everything.

I guess that's the way then, submit the bug report to "everyone" in this sort of situation, even mentioning that fact, so perhaps the involved parts are more prone to work together in a solution, if that's helpful.