Re: [gentoo-dev] Bug voting

[Tommi Pirinen]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

>No, subtle as in "this bug will cause people various really strange
>problems, but they won't realise what's causing it". Don't forget, the
>package maintainers quite often know a lot more about the package and
>the way it interacts with the system than the bug submitters and voters.
>
>
>
IMHO situation like this, when developer knows more than bug reporters, 
should be handled by marking the bug invalid, wontfix or later with an 
explanation. The current situation often seems that developers decide to 
"know more" without saying it to anyone, and from user/bug reporter 
point of view it seems as if he hasn't been heard or no one cares about 
the issue.

The main deal with this whole discussion to me as end user seems that 
gentoo's bugzilla has gotten very much of the reputation that bugs just 
sit there without no one noticing. As you might have noticed this 
concern comes up a lot in the user fora and granted, the reason might be 
the stupidity of users, but I'm sure it won't go away soon. Most of the 
people complaining about it do report at other projects as well, and 
from my and their experience other projects do have quite a lot better 
response times from bugzilla than gentoo does. Of course this bug voting 
wouldn't be much of help to the actual problem, more than just slowdown 
for the most eager bug reporters.

>Good example: the automagic link detection before DHCP feature that
>people keep on wanting in baselayout. Looks nice on the surface, lots of
>people saying "yes please", but suddenly when it's implemented we get
>thousands of users with broken networking because it turns out that that
>nifty link detection feature isn't universally reliable.
>
>
>
So it's users' fault that someone implemented and released broken 
feature? I know that job of developers isn't easy either, but I think 
this example isn't very good argumentation against anything. And if the 
developer here knew more, he could've just said it's not reliable enough 
to implement.

>Well, either the voting affects developers, in which case it's a serious
>problem because it'll detract from the bugs which are *actually*
>important, or it won't affect developers, in which case your claims
>above are effectively meaningless.
>
>
>
Or the voting keeps users doing something that seems important to them ;-)


-- 
Flammie, generally nobody from nowhere in the internet.
Uninteresting generic profile at
<URL: http://cs.joensuu.fi/%7Etpirinen>


--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list