On Thu, 16 Apr 2015 11:57:10 +0200, Robert Krüger <krue...@lesspain.de>
wrote:
Please note that the main criticism is not that it becomes a problem for
code contributors but for people submitting qualified bug reports
including
reproducible test cases, concrete measurements etc. or contribute these
kind of things to issues opened by other people by submitting qualified
comments thus creating value.
Exactly. Resuming my previous points, one of the most valuables sources of
bug tracking (when a quality filter has been applied) are developers who
strategically use the technology evesomewhere. When talking of general
FLOSS (or even non FLOSS, but with public issue tracking) I constantly
push people to be active and file issues by themselves (I sometimes
support them on how to prepare a good report, hoping that after a
bootstrap they become independent). Any obstacle in this path ends up in
people working around bugs. Which is a pity, because this means that many
bugs aren't fixed, people waste efforts in duplicating workarounds (*) and
in the long run the technology might take a reputation of being
problematic to use.
(*) That's why commenting is important. It's quite frequent that when I
find a problem with a technology and google around I end up to an issue
tracker and find some people who at least was able to provide an effective
workaround that, even though not perfectly, make me able to avoid a
blocking point, waiting for an issue to be corrected. This job could be
eventually dealt with a properly indexed forum.
Adding points to the brainstorming section... what about a public,
separate issue tracker to leave in the wild? Perhaps not officially
maintained by Oracle, to avoid any criticism. The idea is that in this
public, restrictionless Jira it's up to the community to apply the proper
policy to keep noise low. From this public instance, selected issues
complying with some well defined requirements could be later moved to the
official Jira.
This would require some involvement by the community (I mean, more than
just describing bugs and providing patches: it would have a role in
moderating the public instance, and I understand this is definitely much
more boring than grokking code), but I think this is somewhat unavoidable
if Oracle doesn' want to pay the costs for this activity.
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect @ Tidalwave s.a.s.
"We make Java work. Everywhere."
http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/blog - fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it
