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

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Juha Tuomala <Juha.Tuomala at iki.fi> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>
>> Are you saying that we should all clone every report that we all would
>> normally close as fixed rawhide?
>
> Are you saying, that everyone facing that bug, should search from every
> release if that has been handled somewhere else other than the product in
> question?

No. I'm asking for you to clarify that you feel clone is appropriate
for wide spread use for the specific situation I'm commenting on.  We
are very much stuck in a trap of designing our workflow to fit the
tools we have, instead of designing our tools to fit the workflow we
want. I fully recognize that and I'm sincerely asking if you think as
a matter of policy everyone should be encouraged to clone to as a way
to avoid using fixed rawhide as a closure when updates aren't going to
come down for a specific release.

But you bring up another point about terminology.... We don't all
necessarily agree that each release is itself is a "product"  In fact
Bugzilla doesn't even consider a specific Fedora release as individual
products. The product is Fedora in Bugzilla-speak and the releases are
versions.  its a nuance, but its important to note...we aren't all
using the same terminology to mean the same things. The tools we use
impose there on mental model. People who interact with Bugzilla a lot
may not think about workflow in the same way as someone else.

> How the hell some enduser would even know what the wierd term 'rawhide'
> stands for? Or wait, was it 'devel'? Right - it depends on context.

I wouldn't expect them to. I'm certainly not advocating for fixed
rawhide as a reasonable closure or any specific workflow
implementation for that matter. The policy we have now is the best
effort policy we have now.  And with all policy/guidance we can always
look to do better.

I'm asking for a sketch of a policy that would do better at accurately
portraying what deficiencies are alive while still allowing
maintainers to efficiently track which issues they've resolved to
their satisfaction. Till's message about the difficulties inherent in
cloning bug comments are on point.   Cloning seem very cumbersome as a
general policy.  But we can certainly find a way to discuss making it
less cumbersome without getting hot under the collar.

>
> Sometimes I get a feeling, that Fedora is not even meant for 'normal'
> people, not now, not in the future. Currently it certainly is not.

There's a lot of emotion in those sentences which I'm not really sure
I can do anything constructive with.  We can always try to do better.
 And I think generally speaking that is what people here want to
do...to try to be better. But a lot of the time emotive speech derails
the intent.

-jef