On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:39:00PM -0700, David Walser wrote: > --- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > and read them. But I have to wonder. How is it > > that KDE and Mozilla > > among numerous other projects have time to deal with > > far more worthless > > bug reports than Mandrake is likely to deal with. > > KDE and Mozilla have far more people going through > those bug reports. If any of us Cookers wants to help > with that, we can feel free, but I think we'd rather > spend our time on other things.
Complete bull-hockey... 99% of the KDE bug reports are responded to by a very small minority of developers. I see the same names over and over and over and over again... Plus if they have someone spending the time to transfer Mandrake Expert reports to the list they can certainly have them spend a little bit of time closing crappy reports. I'd argue it'd save them time in a lot of respects. Right now to really see all relevant bug reports to what they do they have to read every email on the list. But with something like bugzilla, someone reporting a KDE bug could automatically have their bug report routed to Laurent. If something gets misfiled then all they have to do is reassign it. Of course this only means more work for them if they actually aren't bothering to do their jobs and that means reading the list to find out what they need to fix. And with a little bit of work (like KDE's bug database) you can force people to search for existing bugs. Which cuts down on the "I'm having this bug." "It's been fixed" and "Didn't you read the fix for that last week on the list?" exchanges. It won't eliminate them but it probably will decrease them. And with a little more work it's likely you can even set the bug system up to be able to *gasp* forward the bugs on to a projects own bug database. E.G. a non-Mandrake issue comes in about Konqueror. Laurent reads it. Sees that it isn't his issue. He hits a button and it posts it on KDE's bug database as though the original poster sent it there. Less work for everyone. A far more efficient work flow. And more bugs get fixed. But of course this takes accountability and I suspect the line of it takes too much work is just an excuse to avoid accountability for closing bug reports. Finally we need to remember. The bug reports we make are helping Mandrake produce a commercially viable product. While we benefit from fixing these bugs because they almost always are bothering us, Mandrake also gains. If there box sets are buggy they will receive bad reviews and sales will suffer. Now we don't get paid. We don't get anything from Mandrake other than acknowledgement for our fixes (There are some exceptions, some of us have VIP club memberships but those are few). Even Microsoft beta testers get 5 free licenses for the product they are testing. And that's every tester if you bother to submit a single install report during the entire beta phase. Now I'm not saying Mandrake should do something like this. But the least they could do is make it easy to report bugs. The other thing is that while making it harder to report bugs might decrease the crappy bug reports. It's also going to decrease the good bug reports. Many people have come on here to complain about how hard it is to report a bug. Many more just don't find an easy way and don't bother. Most people don't want to have to subscribe to a several hundred message a day mailing list just to submit a bug report. Further, the developers jump down peoples throats for reporter known issues. But Mandrake doesn't link to a searchable archive of the list. So it's no wonder we get so many of these already fixed or easy work around issues... No I think Mandrake's policy on the situation decreases quality bug reports, decreases the incentives for even people who submit quality reports (I'd like to think I'm one of them), and increases the work load of the developers. So the argument that it's too much work or they don't have enough staff is just a load of crap. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org Never take no as an answer from someone who isn't authorized to say yes.
