dormant bugs and our perception

William Cattey wdc at MIT.EDU
Tue Jan 1 00:41:47 UTC 2008


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 at 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 at 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 at 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 at yahoo.com changed:
>
>            What    |Removed                     |Added
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ------
>              Status|NEEDINFO                    |NEW
>                Flag|needinfo?(grgoffe at yahoo.com)|
>
>
>
>
> ------- Additional Comments From grgoffe at 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...
>
>
>
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>
>
> -- 
> Jon Stanley
> Fedora Ambassador
> jstanley at fedoraproject.org
>
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