Upstream bugs vs. Fedora bugs: KDE people do it wrong

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On 03/31/2010 01:36 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-03-29 at 14:20 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>>> As a user, having been hit by a bug, "CLOSED UPSTREAM" is nothing but a
>>> cheap bold lie packagers use as weak excuse to for not being able to fix
>>> a bug having hit a user.
>>>
>>> In other words: "FIXED UPSTREAM" does not fix anything for the user
>>> struggling with a bug. It only helps the packager to keep his bug
>>> statistics clean.
>>>
>>> Analogous considerations apply to "FIXED RAWHIDE"
>>
>> It's CLOSED UPSTREAM and CLOSED RAWHIDE, not FIXED UPSTREAM and FIXED
>> RAWHIDE. CLOSED does not, necessarily, mean FIXED.
> Then let me put it more bluntly: To a Fedora release's user, both tags
> are a slap into the face of "reporter" and mean "your bug will not be
> fixed".
>

I am about to call down lightening and thunder on me.. but I will be
agreeing with the general sentiment that Ralf has. The naming
convention comes from a time in 1998 when developers were swamped and
thought that sending a customer to upstream or rawhide was what anyone
could do. It turned into a somewhat customer support issue as people
do generally feel like they have been given a "pfluog off". It created
a lot more tickets than the bugs that never get looked at all.

It was brought up a couple of times to change the wording to something
else in the early days, but was in general responded that bugzilla was
not a place to coddle people that was what tech support was for. Now
while those people are long gone from Red Hat, anyone using that
bugzilla are 'stuck' with a limited set of choices for closing/fixing
a ticket.

So in general, the terms are not ones that make friends and influence
people. They make a lot of people who have reported bugs not want to
do much with the project again. How to better handle this though is
something that would require cooler heads than I think this current
conversation has :).



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
-- Robert Browning