I too have been disheartened to hear nothing for months and often
more than a year for problems I have reported.
It is impossible to give every submitted a bug detailed and rigorous
attention. There are just too many bugs and not enough people.
It seems to me, however, that if those in the know could manage to
triage each incoming bug within a few days, and answer the submitter
doing four simple things, the people submitting the bugs would feel
more strongly motivated to stay involved and to grow into people who
could help out in future. What four things:
1. Acknowledge the submission.
2. Identify if it is an already known bug, and if so, connect the
new bug to the known bug.
3. If it can be done with a few minutes work, provide the submitter
with something to do to get them moving forward on isolating and
fixing the bug.
4. If possible, give a sense of when to expect further help: If the
bug is difficult to deal with, and in a low importance subsystem, say
so. If it is easy to fix, give the submitter help in trying to
submit a fix.
Leaving people hanging for months and years has consequences. For
example: I got bit in August by Red Hat bugzilla bug 240326. In
DECEMBER that bug was flagged as a duplicate of Red Hat bug 222327
detected by Red Hat internally and opened in January. The lack of
timely triage meant that nobody realized this EASY bug to fix was
actually affecting real customers. Although this bug is Red Hat, not
Fedora, the principle is the same.
If you at least respond, and respond quickly, you motivate people to
do more work and join the ranks of those helping out. If you allow a
one-year backlog to come into existence, you look bad, you de-
motivate potential good new people, and you cheat yourself out of
useful information and forward progress on the code base.
Bottom line: Every bug deserves 15 minutes of triage. The value
produced is measurable and significant.
-Bill
----
William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc@xxxxxxx
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
On Dec 31, 2007, at 7:22 PM, Jon Stanley wrote:
I was triaging old bugs in the FC6 kernel, and got this back form a
reporter. While I agree that a lack of response can be frustrating
to a reporter, I'm not entirely sure what (if anything) we can do
about it.- I'm sending this to marketing-list since it seems to be a
problem for us rather than QA - though probably both, and I'm sure
alot of us are on both.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <bugzilla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Dec 31, 2007 5:48 PM
Subject: [Bug 204883] Boot fails in insmod after upgrade from fc5
(x86) to fc6t2 (x86_64)
To: jonstanley@xxxxxxxxx
Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report.
Summary: Boot fails in insmod after upgrade from fc5 (x86) to fc6t2
(x86_64)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=204883
grgoffe@xxxxxxxxx changed:
What |Removed |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Status|NEEDINFO |NEW
Flag|needinfo?(grgoffe@xxxxxxxxx)|
------- Additional Comments From grgoffe@xxxxxxxxx 2007-12-31
18:48 EST -------
Jon,
Thanks for your input.
I've pretty much given up with my efforts to further the Fedora
cause. Here are
my reasons:
1) I opened this case OVER a year ago. NO responses til now. Not
exactly what I
would call a timely response I'm sure you'll agree.
2) I have joined several of the fedora lists (fedora-dev comes to
mind off the
top of my head. I have posted to the list several times but have
NOT received
any responses except from Rahul.
I'm NOT a developer but I HAVE a lot of experience working with
systems (> 40
years) of all kinds. I will NEVER tell anyone that I know it all
because I just
don't. I do expect to be listened to when I request info or make a
suggestion.
EVEN if it's just to tell me to go to hell. This is not
unreasonable, I do
listen AND reply to other people when they address me. I just
expect the same
treatment.
Regards,
George...
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Jon Stanley
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jstanley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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