Reporting bugs upstream

[David Nielsen]

fre, 20 01 2006 kl. 12:09 +0100, skrev Ralf Corsepius:

> Put yourself into the role of a user, then you'd notice that
> 
> * duplicate search in RH's bugzilla often is close to being impossible
> [I usually search for duplicates, before reporting, nevertheless I still
> end up filing duplicates, because the duplicate search had failed.]
> 
> * Users are filing "bugs by symptoms", because the often don't know the
> cause. Therefore you will always find duplicates, because users often
> have no possibility to identify bugs as duplicates.

You need applauds, it's sometimes extremely hard to figure out the root
cause of a problem a few weeks ago I was chasing 3 seperate crashes in
gdm, evolution and epiphany on Ubuntu Dapper - only after filing bugs
(with backtraces) for each application and doing hours of research did I
realise the cause of the behaviour was pango. I can't read a backtrace
to save my life but I can obtain them.

Luckily Fedora unlike many distributions care enough about their testers
to provide easily installable debug symbols, without that feature I
doubt I would be on the development release. But there are still things
that could be done to ease bugtracking, lately I've been looking into
the Collaborative Bugs Tracking project and othe similar projects which
would enable all the magic to take place behind the scenes. Implementing
that might work to our advantage.

Regardless of this, if we want the ability to tag a bug as being
upstream, unrelated to the distro - Ubuntu' Malone tracker actually
enables this and a heap of other nice stuff to integrate the various
bugzillas for all the many pieces of software that make up Fedora. If
only dear Mark Shuttleworth would release the code for Launchpad then we
could start moving to that - having worked with Malone and Rosetta quite
a bit I can only say they are good products and hopefully we'll all be
able to enjoy them soon enough.

-David Nielsen

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