Ansgar Burchardt writes ("Re: Forwarding bugs upstream"): > Ubuntu has a team (Bug Squad[1]) that tries to triage incoming bug > reports, including forwarding them upstream when applicable. > > I don't know how successful this is, but if it has success, then maybe > we could try to recruit volunteers for a similar team in Debian as well? > This should of course include mentoring them a bit as well.
Ubuntu on the whole has more of a problem with large numbers of poor-quality bug reports than Debian, but there are certainly serious problems in some parts of Debian that less-skilled triagers will be able to help with. Overall I think the Ubuntu approach was helpful while I was there. Perhaps some people who have more substantial current involvement with Ubuntu can comment in more detail. What I saw was that less-skilled triagers have a tendency to: * make more mistakes than a maintainer will * overall, between them, have more effort than maintainers so it can be difficult to correct these mistakes * copy each other in a way that can make undesirable memes and particular undesirable behaviours spread and then be very hard to stamp out * apply fixed rules to situations rather than trying to rely on judgement (and anyway their judgement might be poor) which in the worst case can make them seem robotic * apply approaches out of their appropriate context - eg aggressively triage bugs for packages which don't have a bug flood problem or interfere with bugs filed by developers * behave as if bug reports are a bad thing and the idea is to close as many as possible (the opposite problem from the other common meme which is that bug reports are a good thing and we should try to get users to file as many as possible) I think many of these things could be dealt with by better education and mentoring, if we could find some people to do that mentoring and oversight of bug-squad style triagers. Debian would also have the problem that Debian maintainers are generally a lot more "prickly" than Ubuntu maintainers. Ubuntu tries very hard to be approachable; this has advantages and disadvantages but in the context of a "bug squad" Debian will also have the risk that bug squad members will get flamed and thus discouraged over small mistakes. Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/19759.4746.747018.61...@chiark.greenend.org.uk