Hi Sven, I am answering here as an active bug triager. Disclaimer: I am not a developer.
On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 11:56, Sven Burmeister <sven.burmeis...@gmx.net> wrote: > Am Donnerstag, 29. September 2011, 13:25:49 schrieb Sebastian Kügler: ... > > So IMHO if you want good bug reports you have to start giving good feedback. > No feedback on bad reports will not improve that particular report and neither > improve any of the following reports of the reporter. Neither will it enable > him to help others on their reporting. So ignoring bad reports will increase > the noise rather than decrease and it will thus increase devs' and users' > frustration, i.e. you end-up with a lose-lose situation. Well, that's where the lack of manpower comes in. You assume that all projects in the KDE family have a certain amount of developers and dedicated triagers who only wait for giving feedback. If only it were that simple... I do bug triaging on Amarok, Phonon and its backends, and it is certainly a job that takes a lot of time, even with an already well triaged bug database. To put it in figures, I work about 30% of my time for bug triaging, clean ups etc. in bugs.kde.org, most of the time is follow-ups on incomplete reports, collecting missing information and closing reports from users who never answer the feedeback requests and marking duplicates where users post the n-th report where we already have about 50 entries, completely disregarding the messages they get in Dr. Konqi. Of course not all bugs have the same priority and it is not uncommon to see users making reports as high priority that are in fact minor issues if you know the project well, another pile of work for the triager. When I started on this there was no active triager and developers simply had no time to look at the bugs database and were easily frustrated by the sheer amount of reports. We had roughly 4000 open reports and it took us about 3 years to get to the current point with approx. 280 open reports with 171 of those being confirmed and ready to be tackled by devs in their spare time (not to talk about the 440 wishes where still some triaging is needed and quite a few of the request are not exactly within the scope of Amarok). There are also other people giving an occasional hand in this so I am not alone on the job. My colleagues and I do this as we have time and because we rem willing to invest a lot of my time in projects we care for and of course we are not paid for doing so. We went from place 1 to place 20-something in the statistics of bugs, but it was a lot of work, and not exactly a very pleasant one, perfectly suited for a punishment to students due to its sisyphean nature. Because of course it continues on a daily basis. Now Amarok and Phonon are only a small subset of the projects in the KDE family and large projects like Kontact and/or Plasma certainly have a lot more work for triagers and developers. Huge projects have bigger report databases and getting the rare needle that is easy to fix out of this haystack is tiring and not very pleasant work, something not many are willing to do because there are so many far more attractive things to do in your spare time. Sorry, this got a bit long but I wanted to put things a bit in perspective, as most users simply have no idea of the dimensions of the task. Regards, Myriam -- Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
