On Friday 16 February 2007, Bo Ørsted Andresen wrote: > 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.
Perhaps I should elaborate a little, my first post didn't make the entire thing clear. I'm not saying dupes are good, I'm saying that dupes are a fact of life and users enter them. They are annoying to be sure, but we can make a choice: a. discard them out of hand and get all upset, or b. note them, be aware that more than one user ran into the bug, see if there's useful info in the dupe report, mark it as a dupe and get back to work. These take up about the same amount of time and a) is completely negative while b) first extracts any information that is to be had. Personally, I prefer b) as it's a nicer attitude. > 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..). The first "Me too!" probably happened when the second user switched on the first computer and spoke to the first user. They happen, and when users out there in the wild go to bgo and find a bug report relevant to them, they are gonna find a way to enter a Me Too! Why? Because they went to bgo to find information, found it, and now they want to communicate. The user doesn't have a clue what's going on around the dev or any other user, he only sees his own bug and sees that there are nice people at gentoo.org who will help him out, and that there are other people just like him. And he will communicate that. It's all perfectly natural and quite unstoppable. If this causes the devs to be buried alive under sheer quantities of data, then it's time to change the process, without making it impossible for users to communicate that they too ran into a certain bug > 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.. Very true > > 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. The comparison is that customers are important and worth listening to. One amazing thing about www.gentoo.org is that over and over again I see statements like "we should do X because the users want it" or "Y is causing problems for users". I can't ever remember seeing a dev say things like "We should do Z because I want Z". That's really cool, I take it to mean that the dude maintaining an arb ebuild does it partly to help make *my* life easier, and he thinks I am important to him - just like paying customers are important to businesses alan -- Optimists say the glass is half full, Pessimists say the glass is half empty, Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be? Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
