On Monday 26 February 2007, Marco d'Itri wrote: > On Feb 26, Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > "You and others" cannot substitute for a response *from the package > > maintainer* acknowledging (or otherwise) the bug report. That's the > > criterion being discussed here: not a resolution for the reported bug, > > but rather a first response from the package maintainer to the bug > > report, to acknowledge that it has not been ignored. > > If a maintainer keeps doing uploads we can be almost sure that he is not > "ignoring" bugs too.
no we can't, as an example I had a bugrapport (with patch) open on desktop-base for over a year, no reply. It came up in discussion at debian-desktop list and turns out the maintainer list had somehow gotten unsubscribed from the package bugs, and the maintainer simply hadn't seen the bug. > Providing an useful answer to a bug requires proper bug triage, which > requires time. Just an ack, would alleviate frustration on the users' part enourmously. I'm thinking of something like the following: I've seen your bug report, at first glance fixing it seems to have lower priority then A, B, and C on my TODO-list. So please be patient, I will get around to it eventually. If you want to help speed things up by helping with bug triage or patches that would be both welcome and very much apreciated. Note that the point of such a standard answer mail is not to get the bug fixed faster, instead the point is to: 1) you don't want to leave people hanging (as an exercise in understanding the users point of view pretend it's an ftpmaster or other central project function that isn't showing any visible reaction to whatever information/action request you send) 2) it might prompt the bug reporter or somebody else noticing this to jump in and help out. Also note this doesn't have to take long. Basically: 1) check if the bug is _obviously_ major enought to have to be dealt with immediately. (you do that already right?) 2) if not send your standard reply, asking users to either be patient or help out -- Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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