Bug#714399: a7xpg: spaceship drifts to upper left corner of screen making gameplay impossible

[Markus Koschany]

Am 22.12.2015 um 21:36 schrieb Jason Quinn:
> Your sentence that says "when you can't reproduce such an apparently
> obvious issue" that makes it sound as if I'm doing something wrong.
> It's clear you intend to say that you cannot reproduce the issue but
> your phrasing could be improved.
> 
> I do not have a joystick. The keyboard is attached to a laptop. I have
> not tried the game recently on another computer but if I get the
> chance I will. As I wrote before, I believe I have already seen this
> issue on multiple machines (likely on another Dell laptop at minimum)
> but it's been a long time since I would have tried and I don't recall
> anything for certain.
> 
> As for seeing more people report the bug, this an an obscure game.
> When you start with the small fraction of people running Debian and
> multiply it by the fraction of people who actually install this game
> and then multiply by the fraction of people who experience the bug,
> and then multiply the fraction of people who report bugs (which is
> canonically taken to be about 1 in 100 users) , you are getting down
> to a small number of expected bug reports... perhaps on the order of
> one like just me. While it's interesting that you do not experience
> the bug, I assure you the bug does happen for me; and your message
> almost makes it sound like you dismiss the concept of bugs that depend
> on various external issues or even hardware. It's far from obvious to
> me that we should have seen more confirms in this case and I also note
> the lack of additional "works for me" comments. So please don't
> dismiss my report as if you are sceptical of the problem that *I'm*
> experiencing because just because you don't see it.
> 
> Jason

The point is that you reported a bug against a7xpg which nobody could
reproduce and then we rely on the submitter to provide further
information, so that we can narrow the issue down. [1] Two years ago I
sent you an e-mail which you never replied to. Bug reports are for
tracking errors in software and to eventually make software better but
first of all we have to agree on that there is an error at all before we
can even start to work on a solution.

While reading your bug report and playing the game myself, it was
obvious to me that the game must be unplayable for you but that your
hardware must have played a decisive part. Hence my suggestion to try
the game on another computer to confirm my suspicion. It could be a bug
in the SDL library which a7xpg depends on, it could be an issue with
your keyboard or keyboard drivers or something completely different. If
we knew more about your setup, we probably could find the root cause but
that requires more information from your side.

As it stands it is unlikely that the bug is in a7xpg but in some other
package. Please try to reproduce this issue on another computer with
different hardware and also try to confirm whether this issue exists in
a more recent release of Debian like Debian Jessie or better Sid. It
might be totally possible that a system upgrade will solve all your
problems.

Markus

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=714399#8

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