Maintainer Responsibilities

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 11:26:12PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Reindl Harald wrote:
> > If you want that the enduser report bugs upstream you get no repsonse
> > in many cases because the user will say "WTF i wanted to help and you
> > want to say me exactly how i have to help" and after this happens
> > trhee times he is frustrated and will never ever report bugs
> 
> Your misunderstanding is there: it's US maintainers that are helping YOU
> reporters by fixing your bugs. If you think you don't need our help because
> you don't care about the bug anyway, we can just close it as
> INSUFFICIENT_DATA and stop there.

Careful with that "we". I'd rather have a large list of open but low 
priority and difficult to reproduce bugs than have users who never 
bother reporting bugs in the first place - I may never get round to 
fixing them myself, but having that bug open makes it easier for other 
people who hit the same issue to determine that it is a bug and perhaps 
save themselves some time. And if it ever does get fixed, then that's 
even better. Flagging it closed means that's less likely to happen, and 
the quality of the software that we ship (and, as a result, the 
perceived usefulness of Fedora) is lower as a result.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org