bugzilla triage madness :-/

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Tue Apr 8 12:23:59 UTC 2008


On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 05:01:14AM -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
>
> Common sense dictates more information will get better results.  You 

Not if the packager don't care. I have entered bug reports with patches,
or with trivial fixes, with everything needed to fix it. Sometimes I
took the time to make patches, just to have it rejected, because the
packager didn't want a feature but never said it. So bugs with more
reporter work is not necessarily a bug that will get more attention and
be fixed faster. In those cases investing time in the bug reporting is a
waste of time, which is better used as doing packaging or development
elsewhere.

> I don't see how any adult who uses a computer could assume anything *but* 
> that a better bug report will be more likely to get fixed than an 
> incomplete one.  

The likelyhood of having a bug fixed is not necessarily well correlated
with the completness of the report or the ease of the fix. I reported
many packaging bugs trivial to fix that are not fixed after months or
years, sometime with patches (but I stopped doing patches unless being
asked for because it was an obvious waste of my time, see above).

> help improve it.  While it may actually help fix the bug, it takes more 
> effort on the developer end to fix those.

I think that those kind of bug reports should just be ignored with rude
comments. I did such bug reporting in the past (with good intentions), 
and I think that it is not an issue to repell such bug reporting and
reporters. It helped me, for instance, understanding what was a good bug
report even if it pissed me off.

> report with the info that was needed... but thats not possible if the bug 
> reporter does not 'stay interested' in the bug and respond if/when any 
> progress gets made.

What you say is very true for some bug reports. But other are very
different. Some bug reports are done by well informed people who
provide all the needed information. By adding comments to old bugs with
patches or information provided, for reporters that own plenty of these
reports, you are being counter productive. I don't have an opinion on
the whole process, since I don't have a metric on the number of such
bugs relative to bugs from newby/usual testers that should be closed 
after some time, but I can say that for my bug reports it was a waste 
of my time.

> to kde forever, etc), then the reporter is not beneficial and maybe its 
> best for them to go ahead and change projects?  I think almost all FOSS 
> communities have become bloated with people giving this level of 
> 'interest', but thats just my 2c.

I fully agree, but this is yet another reason to treat well those who
are really interested. By fostering at chasing away those with little
interest you also add burden at those who do a good reporting job, when
these are package maintainers who are slow (and it is very common in
fedora, as far as my experience goes -- this is not a criticism, fixing
bugs isn't necessarily a priority).

--
Pat




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