On 03/29/2013 01:46 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 01:35:59PM -0400, Chris Knadle wrote: >> I'm open to other theories as to the cause. I am, however, a bit surprised >> that you'd completely dismiss the theory I've proposed so quickly. >> let you know that I regularly bump into users in Debian IRC channels saying >> things such as "I need to be involved in another bug report like I need a >> hole >> in the head." I take that as a clear signal that there's a problem. > > Well, I certainly didn't mean to imply that bug report handling is not > something we should look into improving. It's the causation relationship > between that and the decreasing number of bug reports which seems > unlikely to me. I'll be totally happy to reconsider that and I'm > generally very open to reconsider my positions. But I do think that we > need some concrete, scientific evidence, to prove causation in this > case, and I've yet to see some of it.
Do we need to scientifically prove causation here? Chris is raising a
good point, and a perception of hostile responses to a bug reports seems
entirely plausible as a contributing factor to a decline in bug reports.
It certainly wouldn't account for an increase in bug reports (i suspect
the set of socially-masochistic users is a vanishingly small one :P )
For that matter, I haven't seen any concrete, scientific evidence to
support zack's suggestion that derivative distributions are siphoning
off our bug reports. While it seems potentially a plausible
contributing factor to me, i could also see an argument that the more
derivative distros we support, the *more* bug reports we should get.
(e.g. because all the downstream devs are upstreaming their reports and
fixes back to debian, like we want them to, right?)
These are not mutually-exclusive explanations, either, and there is no
single, simple cause for outcomes like a decline in the number of bug
reports. I don't think that demanding "concrete, scientific evidence"
is a reasonable bar for just considering what "might be one explanation
for the steady drop in new bug reports" (chris's original words).
--dkg
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