frustration: mailing lists and bugzilla reports

[Gene C.]

While this message will ultimately meet the "requirements" for reporting to 
this list ("is this a bug"==fedora-list, "here is a proposed 
patch"==fedora-devel-list, and "here are some rpms to 
test"==fedora-test-list), I am going to take the opportunity to comment on a 
couple other items.

First, I can empathize with those posting to this list about bugs rather than 
fedora-list because the fedora-list has a too low signal-to-noise ratio.  The 
problem described below has been posted to the fedora-list but has received 
little in comments.  Few Red Hat folks seem to read the list (noteable 
exception is Bill Nottingham) and I cannot blame them due to the S/N ratio.

Second, I have a question concerning bugzilla reports.  Many reports appear to 
stay in a "NEW" status for a very long time (sometimes forever).  While some 
individuals may be away due to circumstances such as vacation, being sick, 
etc., I would expect that some attention would be paid to these reports.  It 
is frustrating when they appear to be ignored and the bug continues ... like, 
why bother reporting it when the report is ignored.

Case in point concerns the working of the gnome panel drawers in Fedora Core 
1.  During the test cycle when I found that drawers were not 
converting/working, I reported that: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107648
I then found another report 
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=104492) and closed mine 
in its failure.

2. I continued to hope that this would be fixed in FC1 but when it was not, I 
looked at bugzilla.gnome.org and found that the problem had been found and 
fixed in cvs (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121072).  Now the 
report in the Red Hat bugzilla had a number of other bugs marked as dups so 
this was something bother a lot of individuals.  The problem had been fixed 
in cvs around 16 Sep so there was lots of time to get this fixed before FC1.  
This is frustrating.

3.  OK, so was the update simple ... yes.  Looking at the update in the gnome 
cvs, only one file was hit by the update -- button-wedget.c.  I created a 
patch for only button-widget.c which incorporated updates from the gnome cvs 
-- by the time I got to it, there had been three updates: the drawer fix plus 
two other patches which did some minor changing of text messages.  While the 
text message updates also hit other modules, to have them only 
button-widget.c did not appear to cause any problems.  I have attached the 
patch to bugzilla 104492 as a proposed fix.

4.  I also built some rpms with the patch and have posted them to anonymous 
ftp at ftp://czarc.net/pub

The status of the bugzilla report as of today: still marked as new.  
Frustrating.
-- 
Gene