bugzilla bugzappers?

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Bert Desmet wrote:
> hi!
>
> This is something I got in my mail box today.
> As I don't have a valid answer for this, maybe someone else can answer for me?
>
> cheers, Bert
>
> the url of the blog of the guy: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/
>
> == the mail ==
>
> Dear Fedoracommunity,
>
> Over the course of the day I recieved 22^3 mails from your friendly Bug Zapper.
> Most of those bugs where bugs I had reported upon crashes using
> bug-buddy. Bugs on different desktop tools such as .. synergy,
> evolution, gwibber , gnome-settings and probably some others
>
> I do understand that I development goes on and on .. and your fancy
> devs don't care anymore about
> bugs I reported on Fedora 12 as they are all hacking on Fedora 15.
>
> But what I don't get is that non of these bugs was ever touched,
> they've been automatically created , and automatically closed
>
> <a href="http://tieguy.org/blog/2004/09/">Luis</a> already told us
> ages ago .. that every project needs a bugmaster  apparently Fedora
> replaced that bugmaster with a Bug Zapper.
>
> So can someone please explain my why I should continue to try to
> improve Fedora by reporting bugs ?
>


Maybe it is time to discuss the usefulness of ABRT to Fedora. I think
that it is a great idea for commercial products such as RHEL, but it
obviously did not fit Fedora as is.

>From what I have seen, the maintainers are more responsive to manually
filed bugs than to ABRT filed bugs (Am I wrong?). Apparently the
current setup is driving users (such as the person in the above email)
away who are otherwise willing to report bugs. This is not good.

What can we do to make it better? Some ideas:

1.
- ABRT stops reporting new bugs to Fedora.
- The user does a self evaluation: Is the bugcoding related, or
packaging related?
- If he thinks the bug is packaging related, or if he's not sure, he
manually files a bug to Fedora bugzilla. Otherwise he notifies the
developers.
- The package maintainer asks for a backtrace
- User reproduces the crash, and puts the bug number in ABRT gui. ABRT
posts the backtrace to the bug report as an attachment.
- If the bug is coding related, the package maintainer can direct the
user to the developers.

2.
There can be a checkbox in pkgdb for maintainers to turn off ABRT bug
reporting for their packages.

3.
?

Orcan