Re: some bugs

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-03-04 at 04:34, Chris Chabot wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> >[..] For my part as bugmaster:
> >Bugs that don't get reported in bugzilla don't get fixed... I hear
> >people bitch in IRC and other places that 'feature foo doesn't work.' I
> >can, and do, bitch/cajole/what have you at people to fix feature foo.
> >But I don't/can't if they aren't filed. DON'T ASSUME THE MAINTAINER
> >KNOWS IT IS A PROBLEM... people assume it is. And that's very often not
> >the case. If you file a bug, and the maintainer already knows, then
> >great; they've got a report they can use to track the problem. If you
> >file a bug, and they didn't know about it, then... great. They might fix
> >it. They definitely weren't going to fix it before. [..]
> >
> A question related to this though. I filed around 80 bugs in bugzilla so 
> far, and for a to large a percentage, i get the feeling the maintainers 
> didn't even look at the bug i filed.
> 
> In a lot of cases, the product in question has changed to often in 
> various new releases the bug entries are no longer relevant, and in 
> other cases, the bug keeps its open status indefinatly without anyone 
> leaving comments, asking questions or closing the bug..
> 
> To often i get to close my own bugs, since the report is no longer 
> relevant over time, without anyone ever looking at the bug.
> 
> Admitedly some maintainers are very responsive and make good use of 
> bugzilla, and it is a pleasure to try to help them solve problems, but 
> to often i get the feeling the bug reporting could be in vain.
> 
> Is there something we (bug reporters) could do to make bugzilla more 
> usable and more populair with the maintainers?
> 
> What i am worried about is that if a situation like i described above is 
> allowed to exist for to long, it will turn into a self forfilling 
> prophesy. So many non relevant bug reports, that a developer can not 
> find any usefull information, and so little developer activity that no 
> one wants to report bugs any more.

All I can really say to this is:
*It is a /lot/ better than it was, say, two months ago
*I hope that continues to change in a positive manner
*the only way you, as a user, can continue to impact this is to continue
to clean out crap/old bug reports that are useless to the developer, so
that when the developer goes to bugzilla they get a short and useful
list of well described and well defined bugs.

Other suggestions from the developer community are most, most welcome :)
Luis