Re: dormant bugs and our perception

[Marc Wiriadisastra <marc mwiriadi id au>]

On Mon, 2007-12-31 at 19:41 -0500, William Cattey wrote:
> I too have been disheartened to hear nothing for months and often  
> more than a year for problems I have reported.
> 
> It is impossible to give every submitted a bug detailed and rigorous  
> attention.  There are just too many bugs and not enough people.
> 
> It seems to me, however, that if those in the know could manage to  
> triage each incoming bug within a few days, and answer the submitter  
> doing four simple things, the people submitting the bugs would feel  
> more strongly motivated to stay involved and to grow into people who  
> could help out in future.  What four things:
> 
> 	1. Acknowledge the submission.
> 	2. Identify if it is an already known bug, and if so, connect the  
> new bug to the known bug.
> 	3. If it can be done with a few minutes work, provide the submitter  
> with something to do to get them moving forward on isolating and  
> fixing the bug.
> 	4. If possible, give a sense of when to expect further help: If the  
> bug is difficult to deal with, and in a low importance subsystem, say  
> so.  If it is easy to fix, give the submitter help in trying to  
> submit a fix.
> 
> Leaving people hanging for months and years has consequences.  For  
> example:  I got bit in August by Red Hat bugzilla bug 240326.  In  
> DECEMBER that bug was flagged as a duplicate of Red Hat bug 222327  
> detected by Red Hat internally and opened in January.  The lack of  
> timely triage meant that nobody realized this EASY bug to fix was  
> actually affecting real customers.  Although this bug is Red Hat, not  
> Fedora, the principle is the same.
> 
> If you at least respond, and respond quickly, you motivate people to  
> do more work and join the ranks of those helping out.  If you allow a  
> one-year backlog to come into existence, you look bad, you de- 
> motivate potential good new people, and you cheat yourself out of  
> useful information and forward progress on the code base.
> 
> Bottom line:  Every bug deserves 15 minutes of triage.  The value  
> produced is measurable and significant.
> 
> -Bill
> 
> ----
> 
> William Cattey
> Linux Platform Coordinator
> MIT Information Services & Technology
> 
> N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc mit edu
> http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
> 
> 
> On Dec 31, 2007, at 7:22 PM, Jon Stanley wrote:
> 
> > I was triaging old bugs in the FC6 kernel, and got this back form a
> > reporter.    While I agree that a lack of response can be frustrating
> > to a reporter, I'm not entirely sure what (if anything) we can do
> > about it.- I'm sending this to marketing-list since it seems to be a
> > problem for us rather than QA - though probably both, and I'm sure
> > alot of us are on both.
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From:  <bugzilla redhat com>
> > Date: Dec 31, 2007 5:48 PM
> > Subject: [Bug 204883] Boot fails in insmod after upgrade from fc5
> > (x86) to fc6t2 (x86_64)
> > To: jonstanley gmail com
> >
> >
> > Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
> > comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report.
> >
> > Summary: Boot fails in insmod after upgrade from fc5 (x86) to fc6t2  
> > (x86_64)
> >
> >
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=204883
> >
> >
> > grgoffe yahoo com changed:
> >
> >            What    |Removed                     |Added
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> > ------
> >              Status|NEEDINFO                    |NEW
> >                Flag|needinfo?(grgoffe yahoo com)|
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ------- Additional Comments From grgoffe yahoo com  2007-12-31  
> > 18:48 EST -------
> > Jon,
> >
> > Thanks for your input.
> >
> > I've pretty much given up with my efforts to further the Fedora  
> > cause. Here are
> > my reasons:
> >
> > 1) I opened this case OVER a year ago. NO responses til now. Not  
> > exactly what I
> > would call a timely response I'm sure you'll agree.
> >
> > 2) I have joined several of the fedora lists (fedora-dev comes to  
> > mind off the
> > top of my head. I have posted to the list several times but have  
> > NOT received
> > any responses except from Rahul.
> >
> > I'm NOT a developer but I HAVE a lot of experience working with  
> > systems (> 40
> > years) of all kinds. I will NEVER tell anyone that I know it all  
> > because I just
> > don't. I do expect to be listened to when I request info or make a  
> > suggestion.
> > EVEN if it's just to tell me to go to hell. This is not  
> > unreasonable, I do
> > listen AND reply to other people when they address me. I just  
> > expect the same
> > treatment.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > George...
> >
> >
> >
> > -

Yep I've seen that a lot.  Dev's are busy and generally can't respond
I'm not to sure if this does not occur in other projects but I know when
I post a bug to wine I get a response in close to 24-48 hours even if it
is just an acknowledgment of the bug.

Me personally I've always had bugs responded to so I haven't personally
experienced the problem.  

I do know of one situation but that was relating to development of the
bash in F9 where we/fedoraforum posted a bug report to help BASH for the
init process and we haven't heard back as of yet and that was a few
months ago.  While thats not really an issue most of the users in that
were very eager to help bug test yet there hasn't been feedback.

Cheers,


Marc