Brian Utterback wrote: > Garrett D'Amore wrote: > >> >> Yes, that would be great. Unfortunately the b.o.o description just says >> "see comments", which is rather unhelpful for those of us outside of >> Sun. >> > > It is bad enough that much important information cannot be exposed > outside of Sun, it is a real shame that many engineers who should > know better still put "see comments" in the description field. > > What can we do about this? Is there some alias or something we should > send a reminder to? The last time I brought this up, I was told that > there had been an email that said this, but nobody seems to have a > copy. Unless we get an official policy written down somewhere to > point at, I would hate to dress down engineers more senior that myself.
Back when _I_ was a Sun employee (circa 1998 - 2003) it was implicitly understood that comments was _only_ to be used when data that could not be exposed out side Sun. (Even then, Sun customers could see public bug reports.) Back then it was normal to leave the comments field blank unless some confidential data needed to be recorded. I can't believe that engineers are doing this unless the bug report is essentially confidential data. Of course, I don't have access to the detail in this bug report. It probably wouldn't be hard to change the bug submission tools (is Sun still using Bugtraq+) to throw a confirmation dialog explaining correct usage if the description is too short or the description is shorter than the comments field. In the meantime, you could probably _ask_ the submitter why he chose to use the comments rather than the description field, and note that it prevents opensolaris members from being able to participate effectively. I think even very senior engineers could understand this. -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
