Hi Ronald, On Tue, 10 May 2005 20:55:47 +0200, Ronald S Bultje wrote: > On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 19:38, Christian Krause wrote: >> a) Bug reports are sometimes completely ignored, not even set from >> UNCONFIRMED to NEW for several weeks. No reaction. No questions to the >> reporter. Nothing. > [..] >> You (the developers) can't say on the one hand "please help us, please >> contribute, please file bugs, ..." and reject (or ignore) the help on >> the other hand.
> It's not like we don't want to, but we're swamped in work. We really get > tons of new bug reports. Fortunately, we have the bugsquad to help us > find most dups, ask for better stack traces and such (bugsquad people: > you guys deserve an enormous amount of beer at guadec, prepare to get > drunk), but that's not always enough. If you have more than, say, 50 or > 100 bugs, you tend to lose track of the new ones and just work on random > bug reports in the list and not spend too much time on "paperwork" like > confirming or so. Bad behaviour, sure, but understandable nevertheless. Yes, this is completly understandable. But the question what should the users do? I speak of normal users, not developers/hackers. I believe they could get really frustrated if they are just ignored... > The problem is circular. We need more people to help us figure such > stuff out, but in order to get those new people in, we need to spend > more time on each of those parts, too. Helping us to triage bugs is a > very good start already, but there's more. E.g., you could focus on a > few products in bugzilla in particular, try to get familiar with how the > maintainers work, kind of patches that are easily accepted etc, and try > to identify such patches and get the maintainers attention (not > necessarily via bugzilla, but also via email or IRC). Maybe you could You are right. To get the maintainer work on a special bug out of 100 he must be triggered somehow. But on the other side, most developers prefer an efficient communication and dislike private mails. I can't remember how often I read "please use mailing lists if you have questions, private mails go to /dev/null". I think the synchronous communication with IRC is also a little bit problematic, because not all people are online at the same time. Nevertheless I'll give a try to your suggestion to contact the people in different ways than bugzilla. If it doesn't work I'll tell you. ;-) > even try to help debug (by reproducing, providing better traces, etc.) > some bugs, so that new contributors also have a new better entry point > there, etc. Don't forget, the quality of the bug report makes it all. As > Jeff always says: be the signal, not the noise. > Let me know if any of this makes sense. ;). Yes and no. Your ideas makes much sense: try to reproduce, help debug, ... . But I mostly already do this. If a bug really disturbs me (I can't even install the program, it doesn't work, ...) I already do what you suggested. But even then bug reports are sometimes just ignored. I've seen that in gnome's bugzilla the patch states are activated. I think summaries like http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/patch-report.cgi are really good ideas. Let's hope that they will be used... Best regards, Christian _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
