On 5/26/05, Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Mike, I see where you're coming from, but I think this needs to be backed up > with actual resources from Red Hat to help maintain Fedora Legacy. It's not > good for the long term to provide a *falsely* positive experience -- > currently, the explicit *plan* from Red Hat / Fedora is that bugs in older > releases will be ignored, and it seems more honest to tell people WONTFIX > even if that makes them upset -- unless there actually *will* be resources > for dealing with the problem. Sure.. bugs that only affect the older core release.. will be ignored. No one is arguing that they wont. What Mike is saying, is there needs to be a way to positivitly encourage people who were experiencing problems with older releases and lost touch to upgrade and see if the problem is taken care of in the current release. Its a matter of perception and priority..is it more important to tailor response to the release under which the bug was filed.. or is it more appropriate to see if the problem still exists with the current software? I'm pretty confident many Core maintainers would love for people experiencing weird issues to upgraded to the current release (maybe even rawhide), re-test and report back. Legacy maintainers of course have a different desire. There is a difference between ignoring a bug filed against fc2 because fc2 is legacy and ignoring the reported problems completely. You don't want to give novice users the false perception that that developers aren't interested in fixing the underlying problems at all..in any release..ever. Unfortunately that is exactly what happens to many users.. they assume wontfix means 'wontfix ever in any release from now till the end of time.' Users need to be gently guided to an understanding that the primary focus for developers is the development tree and secondarily the current release of core. Asking people to upgrade to the current release and retest prevents users from assuming the developers are totally uninterested in the problem. The WONTFIX state screams to some users 'this issue is a waste of my precious developer time i do not care about this issue and i never will care about this issue so don't bother refiling it again even if you do upgrade to the next core and still see the problem.' It's not rational behavior. Then again I would argue most 'novice enthusiasts' that make up a large chunk of the incoming fedora userbase every release..are inherently irrational and maybe we houldn't expect them to be otherwise. We can't snap our fingers and make people behave rationally(not till we have federally mandated neural implants), but we can do a little bit of social engineering to make bugzilla work more efficiently as a communication medium. -jef
