On Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:26:13 +0100
"Tony \"Chainsaw\" Vroon" <chainsaw@g.o> wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 01:16 +0200, Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> > 1) How do you feel when you receive an early version bump request?
> 
> If it is for software where I am also upstream (Audacious for
> example), it does tend to annoy me when people try their utmost to
> file bug reports before I commit my ebuild. (I have yet to miss a
> release by more then 6 hours)
> 
> > 2) If you had your way, would you discourage users from filing early
> > version bump requests?
> 
> For things like the nVidia drivers I do welcome it. The time I can
> spend trawling upstream sites for new releases is limited.
> 
> Just an idea:
> How about a metadata.xml tag that indicates whether early bump
> requests are welcome? It's more of an individual developer
> preference, but that seems the right place for it.

Its' half an idea, in my opinion. We need a process, not just a tag in a
file. The tag in the file would tell us how a bug should perhaps be
treated, and metadata.xml is an excellent place to concentrate such
information, but to tell a bug wrangler (or anyone else) to "do nothing
for X units of time" isn't going to work. As for what the tag might
tell us, I think leaving bugs on hold for a few days is not the right
approach - users (as well as, say, fellow developers and upstreams)
shouldn't have to "artificially" wait to make their release
announcements and bug wranglers shouldn't be expected to keep these
bugs on their own lists in some artificial sense - it just means more
work for everyone and more delay in communications between users and
developers.

I am currently thinking of making a very broad division between
bump requests for more or less "independent" packages on the one hand,
and packages that (clearly) belong to a suite (KDE and GNOME are good
examples, although the latter team "owns" quite a few independantly
useable packages) or to wildly popular packages that announces releases
weeks to months ahead (Mozilla).

I personally think that bump requests of the "KDE 5 OMG" and "WHEREIS
FF4?" kind are to be RESOLVED as LATER forthwith. That saves a lot of
dupe checking as well! :)


Kind regards,
     JeR
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