Re: [Evolution] Need help with Contacts

["John A. Sullivan III" <jsullivan opensourcedevel com>]

On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 14:57 +1000, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> > Problems with the three that are "lists" were introduced in an
> > earlier email message, and have not yet been resolved. Another
> > topic :-)
>
> Question number 1: Have you logged these bugs in
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/ ?
>
> Yes, it's more effort to log bugs than it is to have a whinge on the
> mailing list.
>
> However, I've done both, and for getting stuff fixed, the bug tracker
> wins every time (well, almost every time. Sometimes it's not clear what
> the problem is and discussing it helps, or it has annoyed many people
> but nobody has reported it and the act of everyone unanimously agreeing
> on it being annoying leads to the consensus needed about how the thing
> in question should be fixed). But as a general rule, whinging is not
> especially effective. Logged bugs however persist until they are
> resolved, and provide a central point for all factual information
> relevant to the history, causes, and hopefully eventually the fix.
>
> A good bug report should list the exact steps to reproduce the problem,
> so that testers & developers who might not know the area in question
> intimately can try the same steps, and it preferably describes what
> happened, and what you were expecting to happen.
>
> Question number 2: Are you being realistic about the rate at which these
> bugs will be fixed?
>
> For example, in the past 2 years, there have been 136 bugs logged in
> bugzilla (by me or others) that I have cared about, and of those 136,
> approximately 65 (call it 50%) have already been resolved in some way,
> with the remaining 50% unresolved.
>
> Now as someone who has logged or cc'ed on a fair few bugs in a variety
> of software, IMHO 50% resolved in 2 years is a really good ratio (or
> half-life), particularly for a project of Evolution's age and scope.
> There are some projects where logging all bugs is like talking to brick
> wall, and you get absolutely no useful response, apart from the
> occasional "is it still happening in the latest version?" every few
> years. Evo is not one of those projects. Evolution is a project where I
> personally would not hesitate to log bugs, although it needs to be
> understood that it may take some time for them to be fixed (and that in
> fact, due to the way half-lives work, that a small proportion may never
> be fixed).
>
> Question number 3: Are you being realistic about your entitlement to a
> fix?
>
> None of us has any entitlement to a fix, unless either we a) fix it
> ourselves or b) employ someone to do it for us or c) sign some sort of
> commercial support agreement with some sort of guaranteed resolution or
> d) we run a Computer Science class and have made resolving our pet bugs
> into a major practical assignment. Personally, since I fall into none of
> these categories, I'm deeply grateful for any help I get at all.
<snip>
I can confirm that the Evolution devs have been pretty responsive on a
number of bugs I've reported recently with Zimbra interoperability so I
would guess you'd have pretty good success by providing a detailed bug
report.  We'd all benefit from the improvement.  Thanks - John