Over the last few months, it seems that the number of silly bugs is increasing. Of course, in most of the cases, the severity of such silly bugs is set to critical. I won't list all that silly bugs (it would take too long :) ), but I'll take two examples, that are very recent as they occured today yesterday.

The first one is the bug #289666 titled "sane only work as root on 2.6.10 (2.6.*)". The bug reporter explains that the module scanner.o has been removed from the kernel and thus he, and all other users, should use the root account to scan a document. He think it is a critical security bug. I don't know why Julien Blache wrote a README to explain how to be able to scan as user! The command is very simple: adduser user scanner.

The second annoying bug was filled today on OpenOffice.org. It is bug #289800 and is titled "openoffice.org: please enable autosave per default". Basically, the user was writting a text on OpenOffice.org, and its machine crashed. As he hasn't saved the document, and as autosave was not enabled, he lost it. Surely not a critical bug. Maybe the user should learn all to click on the save icon instead of sending bug reports!

Maybe we should do something to avoid these annoying bugs. A kind of greylisting, which first sends back an email to the bug reporters (asking them if they have read the documentation, if they have verified that the bug has not been already reported, if they are using the latest version) and then that waits for a key contained in the email to be returned to validate the bug. This could also avoid people using invalid email addresses.

Yes, such a system looks like a bit silly... just as some of the bug reporters.