Backlog proposals, now and future - Special Bug Triage meeting, 2008-03-12 17:00UTC

[Jon Stanley]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 1:25 PM, John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:

>  I've been wondering if there is a better way to set "bug reporter
>  expectations"?  IOW is it a realistic expectation for someone to believe
>  that every time they file a legitimate (real) bug that it will be fixed?

Probably not - as a triage team, we have little to no purview over
what package maintainers do.  Also, as has been discussed before, the
Fedora package maintainer is occasionally just that - a packager, not
a developer.  Therefore, they rely upon the upstream developers to
actually fix a non-packaging bug.  If upstream is not as responsive as
we strive to be, there's not a whole lot we can do other than declare
the package dead (and hopefully the maintainer has the wherewithal to
do that).  Also, time (of both the Fedora packager and upstream) is a
finite resource.  You would think that important bugs get fixed
quickly - the less important/cosmetic ones might not.

OTOH, if the maintainer is just out and out not responding in any
fashion, there is
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy/NonResponsiveMaintainers
which can help.

>   If the answer is 'no' how do we convey that message kindly and in a
>  way that makes sense without alleviating people and discouraging them
>  from reporting bugs?

I think the maintainer does, or in the case of a non-responsive
maintainer, the new maintainer.