bug fixes/patches and developer round-trip time

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at welho.com
Fri Aug 15 10:17:08 UTC 2003


Quoting Pekka Savola <pekkas at netcore.fi>:

> Hi,
> 
> Perhaps I should bring up one issue that may have not been discussed too 
> much.
> 
> A lot of bug reports which no one has time to fix is bad, of course.
> 
> But what's worse, is that when someone from the community provides e.g. 
> patches or works for fixing those issues, it takes a LONG time to actually 
> get a developer to commit such a fix and get the problem solved.
> 
> IMHO, in cases I've seen this, most of the time it has taken entirely too
> long (even many weeks or months, even for trivial fixes).

Indeed... One such example is
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81438 which was reported
soon after RH9 beta testing begun, pointed out where the fault is and that 
upgrading the package to newer version fixes it. RH9 still shipped couple of
months later with the buggy version. Ok, the bug may be a bit esoteric (how
common it's to have that big groups in LDAP, dunno?) but since the fix is
trivial, it was early in beta ... Severn finally has the updated package but
it's *eight months* without even a single comment from the developer :(

> 
> This alienates people who actually sometimes fix problems rather than
> "just" complain about them. (Complaining, when done properly, is very 
> important too, of course :-).
> 
> This is something that needs to be fixed, and should be a first priority
> item to fix in the RHL project.
> 
> Whether that requires new priorization for developers, giving out CVS
> commit access, or whatever, I don't know .. but the situation MUST 
> improve, and soon.

Amen. Even something like a keyword/flag to point out that this bugzilla entry
contains a fix to a problem ought to stick out to developers eyes...

-- 
    - Panu -





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