It appears that the general tone of this page is to encourage users
to report bugs upstream instead of reporting them to Fedora.
I think this approach is ill-advised.
While there are certainly advantages to getting bugs reported
upstream, there are also many advantages to having such bugs
reported through Fedora bugzilla rather than straight
upstream. These advantages include:
- Some bugs are Fedora-specific. Most users won't be able to
distinguish between a Fedora-specific bug and one that is
globally applicable.
- Fedora sometimes runs software versions that are older than
the current one. Many upstream maintainers don't want bugs about
old versions.
- Some Fedora package maintainers fix important bugs in Fedora
even before they've been fixed upstream, but they are deprived
of the opportunity to do that for bugs they never hear about.
- It's important for Fedora to know where the "pain points" are
in the distribution, and the best gauge for that is which
packages are getting a lot of bugs. If you tell people to bypass
Fedora bugzilla and go straight upstream, that metric is shot to
hell.
- The judgment of whether a bug should be reported upstream and
then closed in Fedora bugzilla, or rather fixed in Fedora
instead of or more quickly than it is fixed upstream, should be
left to the package maintainer, not to the user reporting the
bug.
In addition, I agree with the sentiment others have expressed here,
albeit not always in the most diplomatic way, that one of the
primary roles of a package maintainer is to be making the kinds of
judgment calls mentioned above and ensuring that bugs reported
upstream from Fedora are well-formed. Therefore, I believe
attempting to foist off that work on Fedora's users is an
inappropriate delegation of work to people who are in many cases
simply not qualified to do it.
If a bug comes into bugzilla that should be upstreamed, then one of
two things can happen:
- If the bug report is sufficiently detailed and the package
maintainer thinks that the reporter seems competent and clueful,
the package maintainer can ask the reporter to upstream the bug
and attach the upstream bug to the Fedora bug report.
- If the bug report is not sufficiently detailed to report
upstream, then the package maintainer will have to work with the
reporter to collect enough information to allow for upstream
reporting.
Note that in neither of these cases is the bug being reported
upstream directly by the user. Nor, in my opinion, should it be.
Jonathan Kamens
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