| Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 2006-01-13, 10:44 pm |
| On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 02:04:45PM +0100, Adeodato Sim?? wrote:
> * Matthew Garrett [Tue, 10 Jan 2006 02:50:56 +0000]:
>
>
>
yep.
[vbcol=seagreen]
a year to 18 months later.
[vbcol=seagreen]
yep.
[vbcol=seagreen]
nooo, the response was, approximately, "bugger off and report
it via upstream".
no indication of intent to take care of it was given.
i _was_ prepared to be all nice and tactful, and i spent quite a lot of
time (on and off, but mostly off) over a period of several weeks as to
how i was going to respond.
then i re-read the message and went nuts, then tried to temper and
channel some of my anger by going overboard and into the ridiculous.
as i calmed down i began to think of _sensible_ ways forward.
[vbcol=seagreen]
i didn't know that. and neither will a hell of a lot of other people.
i just found reportbug about 2 years ago and thought "cool, i can
run a program on debian and i can report bugs. via the commandline.
great!"
it never occurred to me that i shouldn't be reporting bugs,
and nothing i encountered in reportbug told me that i was
doing anything i shouldn't be.
[vbcol=seagreen]
that distinction isn't made clear: it's only if people think about it
that they will realise that they are supposed to report debian-specific
packaging bugs to the debian bugs database and package-specific bugs
to whatever upstream thingy they can find. _if_ they can find it.
and even if some people do think, there's lots that won't.
for the _really_ popular packages, this becomes a serious problem:
the percentage of people reporting bugs into what effectively becomes
a black hole starts to get quite serious.
[vbcol=seagreen]
[vbcol=seagreen]
> Nobody's said "Don't report this bug to us", they've said
>
> All correct. Thanks, Matthew. I'll just note that the Debian KDE
> packages receive an incredible amount of bug reports, and that we're
> understaffed to forward all of them to KDE upstream.
that's why one of my recommendations was to consider putting, into
certain key very popular packages, a means to either transfer the bug
to upstream (via some mad notional XMLeey are pee cee-ey common API) or
to simply put into reportbug a list of packages for which reporting
should be given special messages:
if reporting on package "kde, libkonq .... long list ...." then
report "if this is a bug in KDE itself, please DO NOT report the
bug here, go to http://bugs.kde.org whatever. if you have a
debian-specific packaging issue (installation problem, missing
files, conflict etc.), please continue".
and likewise for mozilla.
and openoffice.
and possibly even the linux kernel, although that's probably the
exception.
other possibilities:
1) add into the dpkg thingy an upstream URL where bugs can be reported:
UpstreamBugs: http://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi (whatever)
if you encounter a bug in kde.
please report it here because otherwise nobody.
will fix it, thank you.
|