Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 10:20 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: You don’t know Jidanni, do you? It doesn't matter if I do or not. Someone who is trying to contribute shouldn't be told to piss off, or ridiculed on -devel. Doing that will drive away not only that contributor, but any potential contributors that are friends with them. William signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 04:19:14PM +0100, Rene Engelhard wrote: If you give me some time and a co-maintainer at hand... I am barely keeping up with *new* bugreports and updating the packages, keeping them buildable, backporting fixes from upstream etc. You are demonstrating another fairly serious problem with bugs in Debian, and that is you are taking this too personally. If you are unable to manage with the quantity of bugs coming in, that's because *more people are needed*, not because you are personally inadequate. That doesn't change John's experiences, and the problem still needs addressing. I have OOo installed and I use it infrequently. I'd be very daunted if I were involved in it's maintenance. I must be one of hundreds of people who give a silent vote of confidence in your maintainership by installing and using the package -- try to bear that in mind when you're drowning in bugs and everything seeems grim :-) -- Jon Dowland -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Le mardi 26 février 2008 à 13:10 +, Jon Dowland a écrit : If you are unable to manage with the quantity of bugs coming in, that's because *more people are needed*, http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/funny-pictures-captain-obvious-cat.jpg -- .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `-our own. Resistance is futile. signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:58:06 +0100, Bernhard R. Link [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While jidanni's bugs are often hard to read and some might be plain stupid, I got many valuables bugs about hard to spot bugs or broken documentation. I think in the large picture he did more to improve Debian than some maintainers only adding package after package to the distribution. I couldn't say that any better. Greetings Marc -- -- !! No courtesy copies, please !! - Marc Haber |Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom | http://www.zugschlus.de/ Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG Rightful Heir | Fon: *49 621 72739834
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:20:37 +0100, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le vendredi 22 février 2008 à 02:10 +0900, Paul Wise a écrit : On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that. Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. Indeed, but jidanni is not a contributor. He contributes a lot of Bug Reports which is important input. Greetings Marc -- -- !! No courtesy copies, please !! - Marc Haber |Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom | http://www.zugschlus.de/ Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG Rightful Heir | Fon: *49 621 72739834
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Le mardi 26 février 2008 à 18:56 +0100, Marc Haber a écrit : On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:20:37 +0100, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Indeed, but jidanni is not a contributor. He contributes a lot of Bug Reports which is important input. While bug reports are certainly important input, lame and stupid bug reports are not. -- .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `-our own. Resistance is futile. signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 19:21 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: While bug reports are certainly important input, lame and stupid bug reports are not. What is lame and stupid to us may not be lame and stupid to the average user. Just because you find no value in a particular report (or set of reports) does not mean that necessarily all of the bug reports submitted by a user are necessarily bad. William signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 02:15:10PM +0100, Mike Hommey wrote: Note that also doesn't indicate how many were actually fixed. We have nothing that look like bugzilla's NOTABUG or INVALID. It would be nice if we had this, actually, and it wouldn't be hard, right? Just define a convention for a new tag? - Td -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Mon, 25 Feb 2008, Theodore Tso wrote: On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 02:15:10PM +0100, Mike Hommey wrote: Note that also doesn't indicate how many were actually fixed. We have nothing that look like bugzilla's NOTABUG or INVALID. It would be nice if we had this, actually, and it wouldn't be hard, right? Just define a convention for a new tag? Yes; if anyone wants tags like this (or other tags) added, just start using usertags for them, and once there are a couple people or packages using these tags, open a wishlist bug to add the tag with a list of the bugs and a suggested description of the tag suitable for inclusion in the documentation. Don Armstrong -- America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic bi-polar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions. -- Bruce Sterling, _Distraction_ p122 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
John Goerzen writes (Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs): Here's the thing. If bugs I submit actually get looked at by a human, and humans are fixing a reasonable percentage of bugs submitted, I don't mind testing things out on new versions whenever I can. I think this is a key point. I've had a number of cases recently where very old bugs of mine have had responses apparently by people other than the maintainer saying `can you reproduce this' or `is this still relevant in the new version'. These messages are IMO useless, in the vast majority of cases. A good test is: what would I do if I were both the maintainer and the bug submitter ? Looking at it that way avoids getting confused, and avoids adopting approaches which just shuffle work about or which even create more work. If I have reported a longstanding bug in a package of mine, I don't usually say to myself `oh look this is years and years old let me see if I can still reproduce it so I can just forget about it if not'. Rather I'll ask `has anything changed in the package which one might expect to have a bearing on this bug'. If the answer is `no' then the bug should stay open until I have effort to actually investigate it. That this might take months or years if the bug is not very important. If the answer is `yes, the package has changed', then the next question is `what is the best way forward'. Sometimes it will be obvious that the code which had the bug has been entirely removed, so that the bug report no longer serves a useful purpose. At other times a quick glance at the relevant code changes shows that actually the changes couldn't fix the reported symptoms. And then there are cases where the best approach is to try it again with the new version. etc. But these decisions cannot be made by unskilled `triagers' who just go around sending emails to what they think of as `stale' bugs. Of course there are packages (OOo and Mozilla are probably examples) which are so huge and so full of bugs that dealing properly with all of the bugs is impossible. In particular, if a package has so many bugs, or is generally so large or in such poor shape, that it is inconceivable that anything but a small inority will ever be properly investigated and fixed, there is no point recording minor bugs in the Debian BTS. That just serves to clutter the bug listings to no useful effect. So I don't mind it at all when then Mozilla maintainers say `is it still doing this crazy thing'. After all I don't even bother reporting most of the bad things Mozilla does; one-offs definitely don't make the cut. If I can't reproduce it then if I were both submitter and maintainer I wouldn't spend any more time on it. So then just closing it is fine. Whether or not a package is like this is probably a question for the maintainer to decide - but if the number of bugs is only a few dozen then I think saying the package is unmaintainable is not a reasonable point of view. Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:37:37PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: David Nusinow [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This is something that's been bugging me for a while now. As our software packages get larger and larger, we need more people to take them on. To do this, we need more people willing to work with such large and difficult codebases. Unfortunately, the number of these people doesn't seem to rise at nearly the same level as the total amount of code we have to maintain in such packages. We could deal with this problem if we were better at training and recruiting people to work on such things. We've been lucky in the XSF lately in getting enough hands to get the work done, but I don't think there's any clear forumla from our experience that could guide other teams to do the same. I'd love to find one though. If we could do a better job of steering people towards these important packages rather than their vanity package of the hour, I think everyone would benefit. There are two specific difficulties that I've seen that I think contribute heavily to the ever-growing bug list problem: * For large, complex projects, a lot of the bugs that don't get answered are of the form I tried to do X, Y, and Z with this package and it didn't work or crashed, usually with the crash happening under obscure or mysterious circumstances, without good information about what happened prior to the crash or mistaken behavior, and often involving obscure features of the package. These bugs are very hard. Unless you know the code very well and can make educated and lucky guesses at where the problem might be and how to narrow it down, they are exceedingly difficult to reproduce in a reasonable length of time. Furthermore, working for four or eight hours to try to set up a test environment suitable for reproducing and fixing an obscure bug is not interesting or rewarding work compared to packaging new software or working on ten other bugs that can be fixed in 15-30 minutes each. These sorts of bugs often are abandoned even for commercial products. When they aren't, it's because someone is paid (via customer support contracts) to do the tedious work of reproducing bugs no one really wants to look at as a hobby. (It doesn't help that over half the time, the problem ends up being some misconfiguration or other issue where the only real change that can be made in the software is better error handling.) Right, this is why I think we need to do a better job of steering people towards working on these large and complicated codebases. Like Steve, I don't think this is a place for casual people to dabble in, it's just too difficult. At the same time, because these packages are hard people are scared of them, and the packages and bug submitters don't get the attention that they really need. I think we need a good way to get people over their fear. I've suggested that new contributors that they join a team so that they can get this sort of experience, but I don't think this has really done much so far, so we're probably doing it wrong. Perhaps we need to dangle a carrot for NM's. If you worked on a big team in a useful way, you'll get through NM way faster, might be a good method. * Training people on how to contribute to a free software project, triage bugs, write maintainable code, and fix problems appropriately is hard work. I have a difficult time devoting enough time and energy to mentoring as part of my regular job, and there I'm being paid to do it and measured on it in performance reviews. It is sad, but nonetheless true, that when I sit down to work on Debian in the evenings or on the weekends as a hobby, often the last thing I want to do is try to walk other people through learning how to program and do software maintanence. That's *work*; I want to do something immediately rewarding, like writing code and fixing bugs. Exactly, but I really think that these aren't mutually exclusive things. Working on the bugs requires looking at the code and, ideally, writing code to fix the bug. My feeling is that if people are used to a package then they'll get in there with the code doing the fun work when they get a bug report. Unfortunately, we have so few people on the larger packages right now, that there's not enough time for them to do this effectively. More hands would free them up to do both the grunt work and the fun stuff that comes with it. - David Nusinow -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 06:53:15PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote: What might work quite well, however, is to have bug janitors (a la kernel janitors) who look at new bugs that have received no attention for, say, two weeks. If a bug gets reported against a package, and the package maintainer doesn't react to it, then the janitors can look at it. They could look at old bugs in general, of course. Does this actually work for the kernel? I love the idea, but for X.org the janitor idea has failed miserably so far. - David Nusinow -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On la, 2008-02-23 at 09:08 -0500, David Nusinow wrote: On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 06:53:15PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote: What might work quite well, however, is to have bug janitors (a la kernel janitors) who look at new bugs that have received no attention for, say, two weeks. If a bug gets reported against a package, and the package maintainer doesn't react to it, then the janitors can look at it. They could look at old bugs in general, of course. Does this actually work for the kernel? I love the idea, but for X.org the janitor idea has failed miserably so far. I've heard it does work for the kernel, at least most of the time, but I don't follow kernel development so I don't know for sure. Anyone else know? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Don Armstrong wrote: On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, David Nusinow wrote: We could deal with this problem if we were better at training and recruiting people to work on such things. We've been lucky in the XSF lately in getting enough hands to get the work done, but I don't think there's any clear forumla from our experience that could guide other teams to do the same. I'd love to find one though. If we could do a better job of steering people towards these important packages rather than their vanity package of the hour, I think everyone would benefit. I think it's going to be in our long term interest to identify some more of these packages that could use help and figure out what changes (if any) need to be made to the BTS, documentation for those packages, and anything else to help new people get into triaging these bugs. My contribution of the day to this problem has been to add a link in the PTS page pointing to a graphic of the evolution of number of bugs (in the top right with bug stats). See for example: http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/dpkg.html http://people.debian.org/~glandium/bts/d/dpkg.png http://people.debian.org/~glandium/bts/o/openoffice.org.png http://people.debian.org/~glandium/bts/l/linux-2.6.png People who do bug triaging like to see the graph go down. Hopefully seeing the chart in the first place will make it clear to potential contributors that there's a place for their work. :-) Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 04:53:20PM -0600, John Goerzen [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: On Wed February 20 2008 3:43:18 pm Ben Finney wrote: Who other than the bug reporter would you suggest should try reproducing the bug? Suggesting put that effort into fixing the bugs is presuming that the prospective bug fixer knows *which* bugs are worth the effort. If the bug reporter is unresponsive, the bug is unlikely to be resolved anyway because it can't be confirmed fixed. What would you put in place of triage? I think that the point is that triage should happen at *submission* time, not so long later. I have learned that certain well-known packages (OpenOffice, say) are bug blackholes. I submit a bug, and never hear anything from Debian maintainers except for periodic triage stuff when a new upstream comes out. I can't speak for anyone else, but in the case of aptitude, I have just about enough free time to keep up with bugs. The problem is that I sometimes want to spend my free time on other things, such as hanging out with my girlfriend, enjoying the outdoors, cleaning my apartment, etc. And of course if I ever do anything related to the project that's not strictly bug-fixing (say, writing new code, improving documentation, or writing messages to mailing lists like I'm doing right now), I also fall behind. Oh, and fixing bugs that are nontrivial? That makes me fall behind too if the bug takes more than a few hours to fix. I know this makes me a sucky maintainer [0], but I simply don't have more time and energy than I have. I'm totally in awe of people who can hold down a full-time job, have a personal life, and still devote tons of time to Debian and be uber-maintainers. I don't know how they manage it. Daniel [0] http://alioth.debian.org/~fjp/log/posts/aptitude_upload_not_something_to_be_proud_of.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On to, 2008-02-21 at 22:34 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote: But the same it true the other way around. Imho it's also not ok to insult DDs publically in the way jidanni did. We are all volunteers after all and ranting on a public mailing list doesn't help to improve the motivation (and doesn't magically fix the bugs). Two wrongs don't make a right, of course. (Eveyone was just waiting for someone to say that, weren't they? It's my turn to type out platitudes today.) The most productive way of dealing with misbehavior, I find, is to point it out once, politely, and then not escalate the issue by getting into an argument about it. Jidanni reports very large numbers of bugs, which are often badly researched, and sometimes quite ludicrous: complaints about spaces at the ends of lines are not worth the effort of reporting. Sometimes he does report valid problems. Depending on whom you ask, he's either a net positive or a net negative, but not very far from a neutral value either way. On the whole, I wouldn't say he's abusive, just mildly irritating. FWIW, I think pretty much the same can be said about Josselin. Until either gets much more abusive, let's concentrate on the important parts of their messages: on the one hand, the mass triage style of bug handling can certainly be a bit annoying for users, and on the other hand complaining about how Debian development is done is best done constructively, lest flaming happens. Personally, I agree with what has already been said in this thread with regards to mass bug triage: it is currently unfortunately required, but would ideally never be needed. Until we get to a state where every package has zero bugs and the horde of a thousand package maintainers descends on every new bug reported, we will sometimes just have a situation where a big package gets a large backlog of bugs. And sometimes the only reasonable way of dealing with that is by the mass bug triage currently being done by Lior. That's better than letting bugs rot, or by closing them by blindly assuming bugs are closed by new upstream versions. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On pe, 2008-02-22 at 07:48 +0100, Michael Tautschnig wrote: Do you think that there is a chance we find a group of people who really like mentoring/training others? If so, we could maybe set up kind of a bug-frontdesk taking over _all_ new bug reports for a moment and checking them for a the bit of information that seems crucial to fix/reproduce the bug. I think it would be a colossally bad idea to require a bug frontdesk to look at every new bug by default. There should be minimal delay from a bug being reported to it getting to the package maintainers. Centralizing any kind of new bug review is going to scale really badly, meaning that we will get a backlog of stuff that the frontdesk needs to do. On the whole, Debian development goes well when stuff can be distributed (automatically) to many people, and goes badly, when small groups are bottlenecks. What might work quite well, however, is to have bug janitors (a la kernel janitors) who look at new bugs that have received no attention for, say, two weeks. If a bug gets reported against a package, and the package maintainer doesn't react to it, then the janitors can look at it. They could look at old bugs in general, of course. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On 22/02/2008, Michael Tautschnig wrote: Do you think that there is a chance we find a group of people who really like mentoring/training others? If so, we could maybe set up kind of a bug-frontdesk taking over _all_ new bug reports for a moment and checking them for a the bit of information that seems crucial to fix/reproduce the bug. You might find some people usually trying to help others on -mentors (and/or on #-mentors). Helping bug-workers figure out where to use gdb, strace, and the like isn't that complicated. Of course, there are hard bugs, and those might take more time. But helping others learn basic tool might help, if they're able to provide a backtrace by themselves, check that reported crashes aren't just PEBCAK's and so on. Although the timeslots I reserved to Debian until last months are going to be reduced soon, I would be interested in being part of such a group. Cheers, -- Cyril Brulebois pgprVSIa57DEf.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
[...] What might work quite well, however, is to have bug janitors (a la kernel janitors) who look at new bugs that have received no attention for, say, two weeks. If a bug gets reported against a package, and the package maintainer doesn't react to it, then the janitors can look at it. They could look at old bugs in general, of course. Oh yes, this sounds a lot better. I'd be willing to work in such a team of bug janitors, and judging from Cyril's post, there might be others willing to do so as well. The only thing that is need is some kind of automatism, forwarding bugs that have not been acted upon from some time to a mailing list or the like. No idea what the proper way of implementing this would be, but I guess the technical part is the easiest to solve. Best, Michael pgpQWWaN5xfGM.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Lars Wirzenius [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What might work quite well, however, is to have bug janitors (a la kernel janitors) who look at new bugs that have received no attention for, say, two weeks. If a bug gets reported against a package, and the package maintainer doesn't react to it, then the janitors can look at it. They could look at old bugs in general, of course. I think this is a wonderful idea. I would, for example, be happy to feed the coordinators of such an effort information about one of my packages and how a bug triage could be approached and then they could mentor enthusiastic but untrained volunteers in how to tackle the bugs. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008, Mike Hommey wrote: Yeah, it must be really hard to be an heavy bug filer. * 1552 Outstanding * 136 Forwarded * 10 Pending Upload * 1 Fixed in NMU * 69 Resolved Note that if you look at his archived bugs you have to add: * 2010 Resolved Some bugs are of dubious quality, but one must accept that in the end, it's still impressive. :) Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 02:09:11PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 20 Feb 2008, Mike Hommey wrote: Yeah, it must be really hard to be an heavy bug filer. * 1552 Outstanding * 136 Forwarded * 10 Pending Upload * 1 Fixed in NMU * 69 Resolved Note that if you look at his archived bugs you have to add: * 2010 Resolved Some bugs are of dubious quality, but one must accept that in the end, it's still impressive. :) Note that also doesn't indicate how many were actually fixed. We have nothing that look like bugzilla's NOTABUG or INVALID. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
* Christian Perrier [EMAIL PROTECTED] [080221 08:36]: Or also sometimes refrain themselves of filing nitpicking bugs for corners cases which noone will ever meet. Or when doing thissend *patches*. Where resources are low, adding more noise to an already noisy pile of bugs is just covering dust with more dust. I don't say that ppl shouldn't file bugsI more suggest to be a little bit more selective when filing them. Just for the record in case any user is reading this dicussion: This only holds for packages too large to properly maintain it. For every package I maintain or might maintain in the future or is small enough that there are enough people to properly maintain it, please file all bugs you find that are not already filed. Especially those about corner cases almost noone runs in. (The obvious bugs I'll find myself eventually, information about the hard to find ones is the most valueable). Of course, this is particularly targeted at jidanni who is very good for filing bugs as most of us know. While jidanni's bugs are often hard to read and some might be plain stupid, I got many valuables bugs about hard to spot bugs or broken documentation. I think in the large picture he did more to improve Debian than some maintainers only adding package after package to the distribution. Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Mike Hommey wrote: Some bugs are of dubious quality, but one must accept that in the end, it's still impressive. :) Note that also doesn't indicate how many were actually fixed. We have nothing that look like bugzilla's NOTABUG or INVALID. Indeed. One could check how many of those bugs have been version-closed vs manually closed. Because non-bugs are usually manually closed. (Though many of jidanni's bugs probably predate the implementation of version tracking) Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu February 21 2008 12:51:42 am Ben Finney wrote: Paul Wise [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm very bad at doing this myself, but it is equally important for bug submitters to triage their own bugs, especially if they have lots or many old ones. It's important for bug submitters to *confirm* their own bugs, especially if newer versions of the package have been released. Yes, I agree. But I find myself on both sides of this fence. When people submit bugs on Bacula that are upstream bugs, I rarely want to try to hack into it myself. I view backup software as something akin to fsck: something I don't want to fsck with unless I really have to, because it's so important. Sometimes a changelog entry upstream sounds like it's fixed a bug, or the bug has been open long enough that some major relevant piece of architecture has changed, and I want confirmation that it still exists before harassing upstream about it. On the other hand, as a user, I may be running etch on a production server and have no means to validate whether some change in sid or lenny actually fixes things. Here's the thing. If bugs I submit actually get looked at by a human, and humans are fixing a reasonable percentage of bugs submitted, I don't mind testing things out on new versions whenever I can. But if there's a blackhole where all I *ever* hear about a particular bug -- or even any bug on that package -- is the periodic does it still exist?, well that is a really poor way to treat users. Ignoring bug reports and then using triage as a way to close them after new releases is an abuse of the BTS. -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Hi,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
With the new style of mass tirage of bugs,
triage.
The user submits a bug;
while (sleep 1 year) {
He gets a message asking him to verify if the bug still exists;
He perhaps especially reinstalls the package that he long ago stopped
using
He verifies it || the bug is closed
}
Now disposing of those piles of bugs is a breeze, and the maintainer
needn't ever actually look once at the bug! Should cut down on
those annoying new bugs too!
Yeah, especially with some of your useless ones.
Or for minor and wishlist bugs.
I agree that some of the bugs which where triaged in the last runs were
obviously still there, but...
For the rest of my answer, see my answer to John.
Regards,
Rene
--
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Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Hi, John Goerzen wrote: I have learned that certain well-known packages (OpenOffice, say) are bug OpenOffice isn't in Debian. If you mean OpenOffice.org, I feel obliged to answer this now, because you complely underestimate a) how many people maintain OOo (hint: 1) and b) how many time even keeping up is. blackholes. I submit a bug, and never hear anything from Debian maintainers except for periodic triage stuff when a new upstream comes out. Sorry, that's not fair at all. If they suspect it was upstream-related, it should have been forwarded. And detecting this needs time. And testing. And even then, when forwarding bugs they might lie at upstream bugtracker for years anyway because Sun doesn't care (and some of the long-forwarded bugs were included in Liors last triage if I am not wrong) But I can't submit OpenOffice bugs upstream because we don't use OpenOffice.Org's source trees. Sigh. Sorry, that's not true either. You can install a plain OOo in parallel with some hackery (use the rpms, install to a rpm db with --force --nodeps) There appears to be no place for Debian users to submit OpenOffice bugs where a human will investigate. If you give me some time and a co-maintainer at hand... I am barely keeping up with *new* bugreports and updating the packages, keeping them buildable, backporting fixes from upstream etc. And you *have* to admit it's gone a bit better for new bugs, it's just that old bugs suffer, I admit, but I simply have no time to go over all of them. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=419523 for a RFH open for looong. Regards, Rene -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Hi all, On Do, 21 Feb 2008, Rene Engelhard wrote: I am barely keeping up with *new* bugreports and updating the packages, keeping them buildable, backporting fixes from upstream etc. We from the Debian TeX Team have a very similar problem. There are about 300 bugs taken over from teTeX times into the TeX Live packages. Our team consists of a few DD and few helpers, but of all I am currently the only actually active one (and I myself am on permanent quasi VAC till May). I try to keep up with new bugs and fixing them, but there is NO way I will *ever* find time to go through 300 bugs taken over from tetex. I was (and am) tempted to do something similar, because I consider this pile of dust^Wbugs just obscurring the important things. I consider currently: - severity = important - fit for my time investment - severity = serious - trying to fix immediately - severity = normal - let them rod That is the reality. Now and then I try to fix new bugs of sevrerity normal or wishlist, but that's it. The problem with most bugs are that submitters do not care at all to - try to find a solution themselves - read other bug reports - use google - read the policy - think Sounds harsh, but that is the reality, unfortunately. Have a lot of fun, and when I am back from the mountains expect some bug triaging from TeX Live packages ... Best wishes Norbert --- Dr. Norbert Preining [EMAIL PROTECTED]Vienna University of Technology Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian TeX Group gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094 --- BENBURB The sort of man who becomes a returning officer. --- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fwd: Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Hi again, See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=419523 for a RFH open for looong. Oh, and note that I *did* reply to the offers there, but that didn't turn out (except Lior and and Tim Richardson with their bug triage of *OLD* bugs which I am very thankful for) Regards, Rene -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Hi, John Goerzen wrote: blackholes. I submit a bug, and never hear anything from Debian maintainers except for periodic triage stuff when a new upstream comes out. Sorry, that's not fair at all. The two bugs I see in src:openoffice.org with my name on them are: #420647, hanging in calc, which I confirmed was a Debian problem because I could not reproduce it with OOo builds on the same machine, and also had another person see it But you didn not a file - contrary to what you promised. Which was reported against a version not anywhere anymore :/ #418875, OOo crashing, which included a gdb backtrace Which was reported against a version not anywhere anymore :/ Both are over 300 days old, being submitted in April 2007. Neither had any comment from an OOo maintainer save for the message from Lior on Feb. 18, Uhm, 420647 had a comment from upstream. But now that I look over the bug again, it was just sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED], which of course do not reach you... Which is no longer practical, because we may no longer have the files around or know what they were, the impacted users may no longer be with the company, etc. I would have been happy to provide maintainers with whatever info was needed when the bug was reported and it was actively being looked So you want to say with that that you can't test with 2.4 whether those ones are fixed? at here, but almost a year later with no non-automated correspondence isn't a good thing. I agree. But the baby has already fallen into the fountain as we say in Germany.. Regards, Rene -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Le jeudi 21 février 2008 à 05:11 +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :
With the new style of mass tirage of bugs,
The user submits a bug;
while (sleep 1 year) {
He gets a message asking him to verify if the bug still exists;
He perhaps especially reinstalls the package that he long ago stopped using
He verifies it || the bug is closed
}
Now disposing of those piles of bugs is a breeze, and the maintainer
needn't ever actually look once at the bug! Should cut down on
those annoying new bugs too!
How about giving a hand to those who maintain large packages so that
these bugs can actually be fixed?
OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that.
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.''`.
: :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
`-our own. Resistance is futile.
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Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that. Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Le vendredi 22 février 2008 à 02:10 +0900, Paul Wise a écrit : On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that. Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. Indeed, but jidanni is not a contributor. -- .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `-our own. Resistance is futile. signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu February 21 2008 9:19:14 am Rene Engelhard wrote: Hi, John Goerzen wrote: I have learned that certain well-known packages (OpenOffice, say) are bug OpenOffice isn't in Debian. If you mean OpenOffice.org, I feel obliged to answer this now, because you complely underestimate a) how many people maintain OOo (hint: 1) and b) how many time even keeping up is. That is, of course, a problem. I think that OOo isn't the only big package that is just too big for its maintainer staff to adequately keep up with bugs, and of course that generally isn't the fault of the maintainer staff. I wasn't trying to say you're doing a bad job, Rene. Just that the end result to the users such as myself is annoying. And that's certainly not your fault if nobody is stepping up to help. blackholes. I submit a bug, and never hear anything from Debian maintainers except for periodic triage stuff when a new upstream comes out. Sorry, that's not fair at all. The two bugs I see in src:openoffice.org with my name on them are: #420647, hanging in calc, which I confirmed was a Debian problem because I could not reproduce it with OOo builds on the same machine, and also had another person see it #418875, OOo crashing, which included a gdb backtrace Both are over 300 days old, being submitted in April 2007. Neither had any comment from an OOo maintainer save for the message from Lior on Feb. 18, 2008, asking me to try to replicate this with newer versions. Which is no longer practical, because we may no longer have the files around or know what they were, the impacted users may no longer be with the company, etc. I would have been happy to provide maintainers with whatever info was needed when the bug was reported and it was actively being looked at here, but almost a year later with no non-automated correspondence isn't a good thing. These two bugs were the primary reasons we had to switch to the OOo builds. So I think my comment was fair. Does it reflect badly on you? Probably not, since you're the only person maintaining OOo and you've asked for help. But I think it unquestionably reflects poorly on Debian. Though of course we are a volunteer project, so it is what it is. I'm just pointing out that. But I can't submit OpenOffice bugs upstream because we don't use OpenOffice.Org's source trees. Sigh. Sorry, that's not true either. You can install a plain OOo in parallel with some hackery (use the rpms, install to a rpm db with --force --nodeps) Yes, they even publish alien'd debs now. Do you think the average Debian user is going to be running those, though? We actually are using those in production at this point because it is easier to get the current OOo in etch with them, as well as bugs we experienced with the Debian builds. And you *have* to admit it's gone a bit better for new bugs, it's just that old bugs suffer, I admit, but I simply have no time to go over all of them. I haven't submitted bugs on OOo recently, I don't think, because we switched to the OOo debs. But I am glad to hear that. -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
[Josselin Mouette] Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. Indeed, but jidanni is not a contributor. Perhaps not, but it does not matter. I have now idea about his status. But I do know that your message is read by a lot more than jidanni, and those readers probably do not know any more about his status as a contributor than I do, and only see two people writing on a Debian list, where one is a Debian user and the other is a Debian developer. They see Debian developer (you) insulting a Debian user in public, and it reflect badly on you and the Debian project. It do not reflect badly on the receiver of the insult for those of use just following the discussion. I urge you to refrain from such behavior. Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 06:52:02PM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: Perhaps not, but it does not matter. I have now idea about his status. But I do know that your message is read by a lot more than jidanni, and those readers probably do not know any more about his status as a contributor than I do, and only see two people writing on a Debian list, where one is a Debian user and the other is a Debian developer. They see Debian developer (you) insulting a Debian user in public, and it reflect badly on you and the Debian project. It do not reflect badly on the receiver of the insult for those of use just following the discussion. I urge you to refrain from such behavior. Very well written, thank you for this post. ... and, of course, full ack. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ... now what? [EMAIL PROTECTED],cs.unibo.it,debian.org} -%- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ (15:56:48) Zack: e la demo dema ?/\All one has to do is hit the (15:57:15) Bac: no, la demo scema\/right keys at the right time signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Paul Wise wrote: On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that. Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. But the same it true the other way around. Imho it's also not ok to insult DDs publically in the way jidanni did. We are all volunteers after all and ranting on a public mailing list doesn't help to improve the motivation (and doesn't magically fix the bugs). Just my 2¢, Michael -- Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the universe are pointed away from Earth? signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Paul Wise wrote: On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that. Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. But the same it true the other way around. Imho it's also not ok to insult DDs publically in the way jidanni did. We are all volunteers after all and ranting on a public mailing list doesn't help to improve the motivation (and doesn't magically fix the bugs). But jidanni did not actually insult anyone, but just made a statement on the current situation (possibly also expression his personal frustration). Our social contract says that we must not hide problems - and indeed there is kind of a problem, even though it's hard to blame anyone for it. Nevertheless we should not use stop with the excuse that we are all volunteers. Of course we are, but maybe there is something that can be done. What about the following (happy flaming...): Let's just pick openoffice.org. Rene needs help. It has 340 open bugs. We're somewhere around 1000 DDs. Makes 3 developers per bug. Let's just randomly form teams of 3 from all DDs and assign a single bug to each team. One week to submit a patch to the BTS. There could be several positive outcomes: Many bugs get fixed or at least somewhat acted upon. Randomly forming teams might result in new teams/corporations for whatever else is to come. Hopefully at least one of each team will have the necessary environment to reproduce the bug. Anotherone might have the required knowledge of $LANG. Well, just an idea. Michael pgpGdY9Llrshx.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:20:42AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: Does it reflect badly on you? Probably not, since you're the only person maintaining OOo and you've asked for help. But I think it unquestionably reflects poorly on Debian. Though of course we are a volunteer project, so it is what it is. I'm just pointing out that. This is something that's been bugging me for a while now. As our software packages get larger and larger, we need more people to take them on. To do this, we need more people willing to work with such large and difficult codebases. Unfortunately, the number of these people doesn't seem to rise at nearly the same level as the total amount of code we have to maintain in such packages. We could deal with this problem if we were better at training and recruiting people to work on such things. We've been lucky in the XSF lately in getting enough hands to get the work done, but I don't think there's any clear forumla from our experience that could guide other teams to do the same. I'd love to find one though. If we could do a better job of steering people towards these important packages rather than their vanity package of the hour, I think everyone would benefit. - David Nusinow -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, David Nusinow wrote: We could deal with this problem if we were better at training and recruiting people to work on such things. We've been lucky in the XSF lately in getting enough hands to get the work done, but I don't think there's any clear forumla from our experience that could guide other teams to do the same. I'd love to find one though. If we could do a better job of steering people towards these important packages rather than their vanity package of the hour, I think everyone would benefit. I think it's going to be in our long term interest to identify some more of these packages that could use help and figure out what changes (if any) need to be made to the BTS, documentation for those packages, and anything else to help new people get into triaging these bugs. Don Armstrong -- It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free. -- Terry Pratchet _Pyramids_ p25 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:20 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le vendredi 22 février 2008 à 02:10 +0900, Paul Wise a écrit : On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH, maybe you're just too incompetent for that. Insulting contributors really isn't helpful Josselin. Indeed, but jidanni is not a contributor. Insulting potential contributors isn't helpful either. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
David Nusinow [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This is something that's been bugging me for a while now. As our software packages get larger and larger, we need more people to take them on. To do this, we need more people willing to work with such large and difficult codebases. Unfortunately, the number of these people doesn't seem to rise at nearly the same level as the total amount of code we have to maintain in such packages. We could deal with this problem if we were better at training and recruiting people to work on such things. We've been lucky in the XSF lately in getting enough hands to get the work done, but I don't think there's any clear forumla from our experience that could guide other teams to do the same. I'd love to find one though. If we could do a better job of steering people towards these important packages rather than their vanity package of the hour, I think everyone would benefit. There are two specific difficulties that I've seen that I think contribute heavily to the ever-growing bug list problem: * For large, complex projects, a lot of the bugs that don't get answered are of the form I tried to do X, Y, and Z with this package and it didn't work or crashed, usually with the crash happening under obscure or mysterious circumstances, without good information about what happened prior to the crash or mistaken behavior, and often involving obscure features of the package. These bugs are very hard. Unless you know the code very well and can make educated and lucky guesses at where the problem might be and how to narrow it down, they are exceedingly difficult to reproduce in a reasonable length of time. Furthermore, working for four or eight hours to try to set up a test environment suitable for reproducing and fixing an obscure bug is not interesting or rewarding work compared to packaging new software or working on ten other bugs that can be fixed in 15-30 minutes each. These sorts of bugs often are abandoned even for commercial products. When they aren't, it's because someone is paid (via customer support contracts) to do the tedious work of reproducing bugs no one really wants to look at as a hobby. (It doesn't help that over half the time, the problem ends up being some misconfiguration or other issue where the only real change that can be made in the software is better error handling.) * Training people on how to contribute to a free software project, triage bugs, write maintainable code, and fix problems appropriately is hard work. I have a difficult time devoting enough time and energy to mentoring as part of my regular job, and there I'm being paid to do it and measured on it in performance reviews. It is sad, but nonetheless true, that when I sit down to work on Debian in the evenings or on the weekends as a hobby, often the last thing I want to do is try to walk other people through learning how to program and do software maintanence. That's *work*; I want to do something immediately rewarding, like writing code and fixing bugs. Some people really like mentoring and training others and find that immediately rewarding. Those people are wonderful and deserve all the praise we can give them. For the rest of us, I think it's often a lot to expect of people. That sort of training is in many respects significantly harder than all the rest of what one does as a DD. It can be a lot of fun with just the right person and a great match of personalities, but on a comprehensive, project-wide basis, you can't rely on that match happening. In a workplace, you simply have to make training happen even if it isn't loads of fun for both people. It's much harder to do that as part of a volunteer project. Not every bug falls into the first category, and I think many projects in Debian do a great job with training. I'm not saying that the above explains everything. But if you look across all of the bugs of some of our large projects that have hundreds of bugs, I think that you'll find a significant number of bugs in that first category where people just don't have the time, energy, or desire to do the work required to resolve them. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
[...] Some people really like mentoring and training others and find that immediately rewarding. Those people are wonderful and deserve all the praise we can give them. For the rest of us, I think it's often a lot to expect of people. That sort of training is in many respects significantly harder than all the rest of what one does as a DD. It can be a lot of fun with just the right person and a great match of personalities, but on a comprehensive, project-wide basis, you can't rely on that match happening. In a workplace, you simply have to make training happen even if it isn't loads of fun for both people. It's much harder to do that as part of a volunteer project. [...] Do you think that there is a chance we find a group of people who really like mentoring/training others? If so, we could maybe set up kind of a bug-frontdesk taking over _all_ new bug reports for a moment and checking them for a the bit of information that seems crucial to fix/reproduce the bug. Well, just another idea. Michael pgpjReEeT1VWA.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Le Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:54:09PM +0100, Michael Tautschnig a écrit : What about the following (happy flaming...): Let's just pick openoffice.org. Rene needs help. It has 340 open bugs. We're somewhere around 1000 DDs. Makes 3 developers per bug. Let's just randomly form teams of 3 from all DDs and assign a single bug to each team. One week to submit a patch to the BTS. Hi all, Similar to the BSP model, bug triaging parties could also provide nice opportunities to do that kind of effort in synergy, (and to socialise afterwards). Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy http://charles.plessy.org Wakō, Saitama, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 05:11:43AM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
With the new style of mass tirage of bugs,
The user submits a bug;
while (sleep 1 year) {
He gets a message asking him to verify if the bug still exists;
He perhaps especially reinstalls the package that he long ago stopped using
He verifies it || the bug is closed
}
Now disposing of those piles of bugs is a breeze, and the maintainer
needn't ever actually look once at the bug! Should cut down on
those annoying new bugs too!
Yeah, it must be really hard to be an heavy bug filer.
* 1552 Outstanding
* 136 Forwarded
* 10 Pending Upload
* 1 Fixed in NMU
* 69 Resolved
Mike
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Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
With the new style of mass tirage of bugs,
The word is triage; it's a term from hospital work.
The user submits a bug;
while (sleep 1 year) {
He gets a message asking him to verify if the bug still exists;
He perhaps especially reinstalls the package that he long ago stopped using
He verifies it || the bug is closed
}
Who other than the bug reporter would you suggest should try
reproducing the bug?
Suggesting put that effort into fixing the bugs is presuming that
the prospective bug fixer knows *which* bugs are worth the effort. If
the bug reporter is unresponsive, the bug is unlikely to be resolved
anyway because it can't be confirmed fixed.
What would you put in place of triage?
Suggesting that the bug simply remain rotting in the BTS seems worse
than subjecting it to triage to determine if it can be discarded.
--
\ [...] a Microsoft Certified System Engineer is to information |
`\ technology as a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to the |
_o__) culinary arts. —Michael Bacarella |
Ben Finney
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Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
On Wed February 20 2008 3:43:18 pm Ben Finney wrote: Who other than the bug reporter would you suggest should try reproducing the bug? Suggesting put that effort into fixing the bugs is presuming that the prospective bug fixer knows *which* bugs are worth the effort. If the bug reporter is unresponsive, the bug is unlikely to be resolved anyway because it can't be confirmed fixed. What would you put in place of triage? I think that the point is that triage should happen at *submission* time, not so long later. I have learned that certain well-known packages (OpenOffice, say) are bug blackholes. I submit a bug, and never hear anything from Debian maintainers except for periodic triage stuff when a new upstream comes out. If they suspect it was upstream-related, it should have been forwarded. But I can't submit OpenOffice bugs upstream because we don't use OpenOffice.Org's source trees. Sigh. There appears to be no place for Debian users to submit OpenOffice bugs where a human will investigate. -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Please don't send me copies of messages that are also sent to the list, as I didn't ask for them. John Goerzen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Wed February 20 2008 3:43:18 pm Ben Finney wrote: What would you put in place of triage? I think that the point is that triage should happen at *submission* time, not so long later. [...] There appears to be no place for Debian users to submit OpenOffice bugs where a human will investigate. All good points. Those are problems that need to be addressed. Orthogonal to that, there are currently packages that (like openoffice.org) have a lot of bugs of various ages. Triage seems to be a good approach to deal with those bugs, and fixes to the problems you point out will not address those existing old bugs. So complaints about triage of old bugs seems petulant. -- \ “The cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of | `\ ignorance.” —Thomas Jefferson | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
I'm very bad at doing this myself, but it is equally important for bug submitters to triage their own bugs, especially if they have lots or many old ones. A ping, some extra info, anything get the bug closer to being fixed. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Paul Wise [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm very bad at doing this myself, but it is equally important for bug submitters to triage their own bugs, especially if they have lots or many old ones. It's important for bug submitters to *confirm* their own bugs, especially if newer versions of the package have been released. That's not the same as *triage*, which is the process of making a first-run estimate of the priority of each in a set of bugs. I'd say that is *not* for the bug submitter to do, because bug submitter will not be able to be sufficiently objective about the bugs they've submitted. -- \ Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country. | `\ -- Steven Wright | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: the new style mass tirage of bugs
Quoting Paul Wise ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): I'm very bad at doing this myself, but it is equally important for bug submitters to triage their own bugs, especially if they have lots or many old ones. A ping, some extra info, anything get the bug closer to being fixed. Or also sometimes refrain themselves of filing nitpicking bugs for corners cases which noone will ever meet. Or when doing thissend *patches*. Where resources are low, adding more noise to an already noisy pile of bugs is just covering dust with more dust. I don't say that ppl shouldn't file bugsI more suggest to be a little bit more selective when filing them. Of course, this is particularly targeted at jidanni who is very good for filing bugs as most of us know. We *are* short on resources and our users should also respect this, particularly when they *know* that we're short on resources. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
