No answer to easy bug policy

[Kevin Page]

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 16:21 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> We do need guidelines for collaboration and to remove bottle-necks,
> where maintainers are too busy to handle incoming bz mail. Perhaps
> they focus on devel and don't mind if somebody else applies a patch to
> F-8 or F-9?

I suspect this is the case - or at least one common case.

Perhaps the problem is more acute with fast moving packages, or where
the package maintainer is also an upstream developer? When,
understandably, the focus probably isn't on existing releases.

Is this a consequence of the laudable push to upstream? Are back-ported
bugfixes a special case that could be highlighted to maintainers or
applied by other maintainers? Could better use be made of the EasyFix
and/or Patch keywords? (I only discovered them because of this thread).

Perhaps if this process worked better more people would be inclined to
seek out patches already available upstream or from other distros?

Or if their own patch take it upstream themselves knowing it was a
sure-fire way to get a timely fix in their favourite distribution?

Removing maintainers does seem silly. It's clear in many cases that the
maintainer is just overwhelmed, not inactive.


By way of an example: at the beginning of the year I fixed a problem
found in F8 and built patches. Nothing ground breaking.

For F9 things worked pretty well. Encouraged by the Fedora "upstream"
mantra (and lack of response in BZ) I went upstream - the patch was
accepted, pushed in an upstream release, and 3 months later carried in
F9. Worst case would have been the 6 month Fedora development cycle. Of
course it's still frustrating that a fix exists but isn't in the hands
of users.

It's sucked for F8 - where the problem was initially identified. It's
only just been partially fixed; some related bugs still are outstanding
and seem to be following a similar path. There's not going to be a
Fedora update to the new upstream release, and while the appropriate
patches (already accepted in upstream trunk - so easy patches) are
linked in bugzilla, there aren't errata or even test builds forthcoming.

I've lost faith that the remaining bugzilla entries will be acted upon,
and to be honest, I'm loosing interest and motivation.

Fedora makes a fuss about encouraging contributions and participation.
Sorry, but I've spent *far* more time and effort trying to progress bugs
than identifying the problems and writing or finding fixes. I recognise
that traditional management structures are often skewed to maximise the
efficiency of those higher up at the expense of those further down...
but if you want volunteer contributors to feel their efforts are
worthwhile and worth repeating, what currently happens doesn't work. 

One conclusion from this thread is that it's accepted that some
maintainers don't follow bugzilla. Not condoned, but accepted as a
reality. That's clearly incompatible with asking users to report their
problems in bugzilla.


Regards,

kev.