I’ve submitted a bug report(my first ever) to the Ubuntu developers, because of a reproducible error with Filezilla in Feisty Fawn. Here’s a little lead-up to why I felt I needed to submit this(Normally if something doesn’t work right, I just wait until it gets fixed or find another program to use).
Last weekend I dumped my Arch Linux install and opted to go with a the latest testing release of Feisty Fawn. For the most part everything worked quite well, I’m really impressed with the pre-release of Ubuntu. During this week, Filezilla(my FTP client of choice) worked just fine. Now, this past Friday evening, I wanted to completely redo the configuration of my laptop. I dual-boot with a XP partition for work and I wanted to make my XP partition even smaller so I chose to do the whole laptop again. Since I was happy with my Feisty experience from the prior week, I decided to install it again. I used the exact same media I used about a week ago. Now for some reason I had more issues. I had a difficult time getting the ATI proprietary drivers working properly. And for some reason Filezilla did not work. This really stunk as I spend quite a bit of time FTP’ing between servers. Why would Filezilla work with one install and not in a second, identical install? Just to make sure I didn’t make a mistake, I went ahead and reinstalled Feisty again. Sure enough, Filezilla still does not work.
Here are the details of the bug. When Filezilla is launched for the first time, it creates a hidden folder in the Home directory called .filezilla. If that directory does not exist, the app segfaults. But does create the folders. With the folder there, the program launches, but can never successfully list remote directories. The segfault could be recreated by deleting the .filezilla directory.
Now because I don’t like any other available FTP client, and I didn’t believe the issue was anything specific to me, I created a launchpad account and filed a report for Filezilla. Within minutes of my entry, I received an email asking for more info. I went ahead and got them the debugging info they were looking for. Now as of this morning, there have been a few more reports from the community and my bug has been listed as a duplicate, but the cool thing is that it has been confirmed and patch already submitted. Now I just need to sit back wait for an updated release via apt-get. Fun stuff!