Re: reporting bugs upstream : nothing on the wiki?

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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:
  1. Some bugs are Fedora-specific. Most users won't be able to distinguish between a Fedora-specific bug and one that is globally applicable.
  2. Fedora sometimes runs software versions that are older than the current one. Many upstream maintainers don't want bugs about old versions.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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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