Hi Akhilesh,
Akhilesh Mritunjai wrote:
OpenSolaris being an open community, it seems strange that the comments on bugs
are still not public.
I won't attempt to speak for Sun Microsystems policy in any way, shape
or form, however...
Please recognize there are at least three communities those bug reports
serve. One is the Open Solaris community. Any bugs reported by that
community are frequently created in the open, as are the fixes and changes.
Another is Sun's support services customers. I can guarantee many of
these wouldn't like information about their systems shared publicly. In
fact, in some cases, Sun as a company is contractually obligated to
treat this information confidentially. Bug reports, along with cases
and other records are used to communicate data, status and actions
around issues for customers. Not all of it is Sun's data to share.
Finally, there is the community inside Sun. This too can have
information about things like systems on Sun's network, contact info on
employees, etc. Again, it's not all appropriate to share.
Being employed in a large organization, I know that most comments are less than
ideal for public consumption :-) , but I'd think it to be a reasonable
expectation that at least OpenSolaris (not Solaris - which is SUN controlled)
bug DB would be bit more open to the users.
I agree, and I'd argue that it is. I personally think it'd be a major
mistake to separate entirely the bug databases, as that would decrease
transparency (i.e. you wouldn't even have a synopsis and a bugid
number), not increase it.
Yes, there are situations where the public notes say "see comments", but
there are also situations where a single minor change to code means
creating a bug, creating the change, committing the change and closing
the bug. That can all happen in the matter of hours. Asking an
engineer to write a public description for each of these (especially
since it may never be important to the community) probably doesn't help
any of the communities.
As a member of the community, and through a contractual relationship as
a customer (which only costs some $160 or some such amount), you have
the ability to say 'hey, can I get more info on this bugid?'. :)
Is this as simple as other bugs where are reported, fixed and closed in
the open? No, but it's far more transparent than it's been in the past
and pretty comparable with what you find in similar projects. It's
probably the most transparent of any formerly-closed projects that I'm
aware of (OpenOffice could probably give it a run for it's money though).
For what it's worth, whenever I create a bug, I try to have a good
public description that describes it so someone can identifiy their
having run into it. I'm sure many people do the same, but there are
probably times where it's, unfortunately, impractical or inappropriate.
Incidentally, in this case, the bug this problem is related to *does*
have an excellent public description
<http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6455727>, as does the
one I'd opened
<http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6491196>. I do see I
should update the workaround though, and I'll try to do that when I have
a moment.
Just my opinions on the matter,
- Matt
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