Re: migrating gtk

[Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org>]

> Considering that you usually stop short of the first step I have to
> ask you: what kind of "busywork" have you ever experienced?

Here's a sample:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694627#c7

Yes, that was you.  What did you really gain from asking that
question, other than verifying that I read my email?

The more typical sample -- not recently practiced by gtk+ -- is mass
moving of bugs into NEEDINFO with a note saying something like
"This bug was reported for version x.y. Please test if it still applies.  If
we get no response, this bug will be closed in 30 days."

The reason I call that busywork is that you can actually do as asked
only to repeat the whole thing in a year when no-one has looked at
in the meantime.  And repeat it a year after that.  And multiply all that
by the number of open bugs you have.

Quite frankly, the rational response to such periodic requests is to
simply answer "the bug is still there" without going through the work
of checking.  That's rational for the bug reporter because it preserves
the investment of time that was put into reporting the bug without
spending more maintaining an large portfolio of open bugs.

I understand that there can be a desire to close bugs unfixed.  What I
object to is sending them through NEEDINFO and then ignoring them.
That route should be reserved for bugs you intend to work on as soon
as the requested info arrives and for cases where you believe the bug
is actually fixed, but just want confirmation from the reporter.

> Of course it is, that's why we generally don't do that — except,
> maybe, for rude bug reporters.

You really don't like to be called out, do you?  (And, yes, I know I am
occasionally and deliberately rude.  The email you responded to was
not rude; it's just that you don't take criticism well, if at all.)

I hope we can agree that bug reporters are volunteer contributors to
the project and that they should be treated with respect.

Morten








On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 5:37 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> On 4 February 2018 at 20:52, Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org> wrote:
> > As a general principle, you should only ask bug reporters to do work if you
> > intend to do something with the answer.  Or, with other words, it really is
> > not nice to keep asking "is that bug still there?" until they get tired of the
> > busywork and leave in disgust.
>
> The busywork meaning "attaching a patch and iterating over it"?
> Considering that you usually stop short of the first step I have to
> ask you: what kind of "busywork" have you ever experienced?
>
> Of course if we get a positive response that the bug is still there
> we're going to migrate it and keep track of it.
>
> > With that in mind, I believe it is much nicer to just leave the old bugs there.
>
> The old bugs will be left there, but closed, so we don't need to check
> two bug lists, and split the maintenance resources even more.
>
> > We never got around to solving the reporter's problem, but at least we did
> > not add to the pain by asking them to do work and report back, only to
> > ignore the result of that.  Doing that is quite rude.
>
> Of course it is, that's why we generally don't do that — except,
> maybe, for rude bug reporters.
>
> Ciao,
>  Emmanuele.