On Friday 16 February 2007 09:37:00 Alan McKinnon wrote: > There's an upside as well though. If many people keep reporting the same > bug in different ways, it tells themaintainer that the bug is higher > priority. If a bug is reported only once, and everyone else that runs > into it sees this bug report, and doesn't report their experience, then > the maintainer doesn't know about these users. So he/she might consider > the bug to be less important, and that would be wrong.
I strongly disagree with this (or at least how this sounds to me). Dupes are a necessary evil because we can't all be perfect at searching bugzilla but considering them to be good just doesn't make sense in my head. Everytime the subject of making it possible to vote on bugs has come up the counter argument has been that the list of CC'ed people already serves that role just as well but without giving the false impression that enough votes will get it fixed. If you want to make it known that you care about any given bug just CC yourself on the bug. I want to make it very clear that purposefully filing dupes to draw attention to an annoying bug is *only* wasting bug wranglers (yep, not the maintainers (and yep, that means jakubs) ;) time just like producing "I confirm this is a bug" comments as the 10th user after it's been acknowledged is only useless bugspam... (I'm sure you didn't mean to do that either but still..). What will get any given bug fixed is for someone (who doesn't have to be dev) to sit down and figure out a solution (and attach it on the bug)... An unlimited number of users saying it's a problem doesn't help at all if there's still noone able to fix it.. > Good maintainers consider users to be like customers and sometimes they > do get annoyed with many dup bugs. Can't really agree with this. They aren't paid so most of the best devs do it solely for their own sake (and because they find it interesting). Also good maintainers fix bugs even if only one user experience it if it's a bug and they are able to fix it. Quality > quantity. > But usually they want reports and it's no big deal or effort actually to > mark a bug as a dup. With the above in mind I guess I can agree on this. If you are unable to find a bug you're experiencing then you'll have to file one to get it fixed (even at the risk of missing it and hence filing a dupe). We all want bugs fixed... -- Bo Andresen
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