On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 06:19:07PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote: > On Friday, October 15, 2010 05:47:10 pm Bryce Harrington wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 03:44:17PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote: > > > Why are we convinced throwing away bugs is a good idea? > > > > Thank you for helping to make Ubuntu better! > > > > Unfortunately, you've not provided enough information for us to respond > > to the issue you've raised. We are marking your email Incomplete for > > now; it will expire in 30 days if we do not hear from you by then. > > Right. That's the brush off we give people when we throw their bugs away. > It > doesn't explain why that's a good idea. > > A bug may lack sufficient information about a problem to enable a developer > to > immediately address it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't describe a real > issue > with the system.
My experience is that bugs on packages I work on are often set to Incomplete when *somebody else* thinks that *I* don't have enough information to address them. The problem here should be obvious: the people setting bugs to Incomplete often do not themselves sufficiently understand them to make that kind of judgement. I, in turn, do not have time to keep going through and correcting all the bugs that are incorrectly set to Incomplete (sometimes even after I have left a detailed comment on the bug explaining why it happens and roughly what needs to be done to fix it!), and the more noise that is generated by this kind of thing the harder the problem gets. At this point I regard bug statuses as essentially random, bearing little relation to the true state of a bug report unless either (a) the maintainer has rather more time to garden bugs than I seem to have or (b) the bug is release-critical. I continue to fail to understand why we seem to guide newcomers towards bug triage. Triage is a skilled task requiring both substantial technical understanding and strong social skills, and is not something that should be given to newcomers. The analogy implied by the very term we use for it is a triage nurse, and nobody expects people to be able to wander into a hospital off the street and start deciding whether other people need to see a doctor or not. Encouraging unskilled people to do this important work merely devalues it, and does not help developers. -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
