Reporting bugs upstream

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 05:50 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> 

> > BTW, I like dups, because users often confuse same symptoms with
> > same bug. I have dozens of people reporting "my kernel said
> > ``ep0 timeout''" for dozens of wildly different problems, all ending
> > in the same bug which can never be resolved. I would much prefer users
> > filing dups than polluting unrelated bugs. But in X, the situation
> > is the opposite: 100 dups for the same thing, and Mike Harris wants
> > his users to search for dups and avoid filing new ones (if I understand
> > him right).
> 
> Not exactly...   For X, we experience both problems.  We get many people
> reporting the exact same issue without them even bothering to check for
> duplicates,

Put yourself into the role of a user, then you'd notice that

* duplicate search in RH's bugzilla often is close to being impossible
[I usually search for duplicates, before reporting, nevertheless I still
end up filing duplicates, because the duplicate search had failed.]

* Users are filing "bugs by symptoms", because the often don't know the
cause. Therefore you will always find duplicates, because users often
have no possibility to identify bugs as duplicates.

Ralf