Re: Bugzilla outstanding issues

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:

> And how are they going to fix it later? Guessing? 
> 
> (As a social phenomena, If you need more information on a bug, you
>  must ask for that _immediately_, or you won't get a response.)

No, I meant you send mail asking for details, wait, don't get any response
but keep the bug open anyways (because as long as the issue is not fixed,
someone may have the same problem who may be able to help with it).

> Well, a large number of the bug reports we get are best answered with
> 
>  "Try a newer version, and if it crashes again, submit a new bug
>   report."

What about WORKSFORME (as developer, you must check this anyways first) ?

> A crash against gnome 1.0.40 with clear reproduction instructions
> is worth leaving open until someone verifies that it doesn't
> happen with the latest version. A random crash with 1.0.40 isn't;
> but it isn't INVALID. Its a real crash, just one that we are
> almost sure that has been fixed, and it isn't worth trying to
> debug against 1.0.40. Thus OBSOLETE.

Hmm, that's probably really a useful case for OBSOLETE.

> NOTABUG covers a narrow range of things within the general umbrella
> of invalid. For instance, someone doesn't know to use gtk-config
> and reports a bug against GTK+ because glibconfig.h is in the
> wrong place.

Ah, yes. I remember. I had a similar case a while ago. Someone filed a
GTop bug report because it shows wrong memory usage for threaded apps,
but currently LibGTop has no way to get this on Linux, so it'd also be
either NOTABUG or WONTFIX (but IMO more WONTFIX than NOTABUG since actually
it is a bug, but a feature suggestion for the Linux kernel).

> Any developer who can't be bothered to be polite to bug reporters
> deserves to lose their users ;-)  [ Though wth non-polite bug
> reporters, a simple closure might be politer than a response ] 

> > It shouldn't be such a big problem to "just close" such bugs if there's
> > a document somewhere which tells people why (and such a document can
> > for instance be sent with the mail).
> 
> If the document can be sent, that's fine. [ Pre-prepared comments, so
> to speak. ] But closing bugs for no apparent reason will not
> get us satisfied customers.

What about these people who don't even take 1 full minute to file a bug
report, who just launch bug-buddy and click next (entering random stuff
just to make it let them proceed) until the bug report is filed ?

I think if writing a reply takes more time than the user spent to submit
the bug report (that'd be something like one minute or one or two lines
of text in the reply), then a developer should be allowed to simply close
it as INVALID (he can batch-close all of them from time to time, for
instance).

AFAIK many other free projects have much more strict requirements to submit
bugs, but they normally have a document somewhere which tells people how
to submit good bug reports and why a bug report may have been closed if they
don't get any explanation by the developer.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)