Tom Haynes wrote:
Matt Ingenthron wrote:
While it's possible to go ping the engineer and that's valuable for
Dennis, it does nothing to raise the profile of the bug to Solaris
engineering, does it? How should a community member raise the
profile of a bug affecting them? email the engineer? email
opensolaris-discuss? My suggestion did not grow out of trying to
discourage people from working together in the OpenSolaris community...
The same way that an internal developer would? Sending email to the RE
(responsible engineer).
And note, I'm only talking in the context of OpenSolaris.
I've got an open bug against the nge driver for my home desktop.
Do I want it fixed? Yes.
Do I want to raise the priority of the bug? Yes.
But those choices lay with the RE - they have to prioritize fixing
bugs versus project work.
This doesn't mean you should be quiet - it might turn out you can
provide more information or
show that the bug is hitting more than just one system. I haven't
overwhelmed the RE for my
nge bug with email - but then again I do not have anything new to report.
I didn't think I suggested being quiet. I thought I suggested people
with support could, if they wanted to raise the profile, get themselves
to the call record that Sun keeps on bugs. I always thought this is one
input engineering uses when deciding where to prioritize.
We both know that in addition to creating a record that someone really
cares about this bug, it will ping the engineer.
By the way, my experience with the nge bug was that the engineer did
some initial triaging
with me and then it sat there for some months. Then the engineer wrote
back asking me to try again
because of a recent putback fixing a driver issue for another
motherboard. Note that he may have
been working that issue all along, expecting that it just might fix my
problem as well.
When that code change didn't work, he told me that he was ordering my
motherboard and would start
attacking the issue then.
I've got a work around in place ($10 network card) and I'm okay with
the pace. I guess I could
have offered to punch a hole in my firewall to let him debug the issue
live on my box. I am
happy that evidently device driver engineers have a budget to get test
equipment to diagnose
system issues.
This makes sense and I've had similar experiences myself. I guess the
reason I suggested it is there has been, historically, a formal/scalable
way to raise the profile on bugs affecting Solaris that is not always
well understood by people outside Sun.
email definitely works, makes a more personal connection that allows for
the kind of collaboration you describe above, and I don't want to
discount it. Still, it's susceptible to getting lost in a
mailbox/organization change/etc., where the bug record lives on with an
RE and responsible manager in perpetuity. That's why I suggested it.
Since I'm not the expert and in the minority here, I'll consider it a
lesson learned and be quiet now. :)
- Matt
--
Matt Ingenthron - Web Infrastructure Solutions Architect
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Global Systems Practice
http://blogs.sun.com/mingenthron/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 310-242-6439
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