On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >One could go through an evolutionary process, from developers, to invited >others, to fully open.
That's an idea I hadn't thought of, one which could be good too possibly. It would remove the potential threat of incoming bug reports of the form: ===== My server no works can for the problem help? It is Acer video and is to the KDE no works when I run. ===== (A real email I've received) We've all seen those type of reports, and we all know how completely and totally useless they are. But, I think also that once enough people get involved, such reports can be trivially triaged, or volunteers can extract more infor that is useful from someone until there is a valid report to be looked at by a developer. >The question still is: is there enough interest among the >developer community to it be worth the investment to get it set >up? If no-one is going to use it, why bother? On the other >hand, if enough of us say, as I do, that we're dropping too many >problems on the floor and such a system might be useful if it >gets established correctly, I think there is enough resources to >start getting it set up. But those resources should go >elsewhere if there is no interest. Personally, I'd love to see interest from core developers to at least poke their toe in the water, and some of them have already suggested they'd give it a shot and if it worked out ok, they'd use it. I think that a bug tracking system would be a benefit all around however, as various distribution users, vendors, and also stray do it yourself people could all look for answers in one spot, and could report distribution non-specific bugs in one spot. There are benefits IMHO for all groups involved by having a centralized bug tracker, and avoiding duplication of effort, etc. I volunteer to spend time working with publically reported bugs in a central database either way. I do triage in our own bugzilla for XFree86 related issues, and it's not likely much more work for me to snoop through a public database looking for more duplicates too, and providing help to people in the public database having the same problem perhaps as one of our users. The more people who do that, the more useful stuff we can supply to other X developers, including the core team. I'd very much like to see a bugzilla be something we can use to give the core team something good. More patches, more widely tested patches, more useful feedback, you name it. I hope they want to use it too of course, but that's only if they find it beneficial to personally do so. If they don't in the end (however I have faith that they will once they see it in action) it would still benefit non-core members by being able to access a central bug database and work together with each other IMHO. I'd be interested also in hearing feedback and comments from Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Caldera, and other Linux and BSD distribution XFree86 package maintainers, and other developers also. I've talked personally with some of them already, but the more who get involved the better. We all benefit, and everyone's feedback is very valuable. Take care, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
