Why should I ever bother filing another bug?

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 02:48 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2010/11/09 07:39 (GMT+0100) David Tardon composed:
> 
> > Btw, maybe you should look at the proverb in your signature and try to
> > apply it to yourself. Because in this thread you have neither shown
> > understanding nor used pleasant words.
> 
> The words I used are not inherently unpleasant, only unpleasant because 
> people don't want to hear the truth they report. Testers who can't fix bugs 
> are treated like lepers compared to those who provide patches, deserving of 
> less than equal respect. As a Bugzilla user for a decade or so, I understand 
> this very well. It's a constant battle to remember to spend enough time 
> rereading before sending in order to prevent inappropriate language to 
> escape, particularly as given so little respect in the whole test and bug 
> process overall (e.g. not only the duping of good older bugs to newer bugs, 
> but Bugzilla itself: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638726 ).

...another thread in which you bang on about rudeness from others but
can't seem to recognize it in yourself. Note how the first comment on
that bug is me agreeing with you about that specific problem. Where you
get into trouble is where you start making grand declarations about how
the entire websites team should be run. This isn't the Godfather, and
you're not Marlon Brando. Exactly as Karsten said in that bug, inflating
a single bug into a grand theory of everything is counter-productive,
and your implicit suggestion that they don't know what the hell they're
doing was deeply insulting to those who work on the websites team.

The problem with this thread is that you still haven't explained one
fundamental thing which you keep taking for granted and assume everyone
agrees with you about: you think an older bug being marked as a
duplicate of a newer bug is a huge problem. What I'm trying to explain
is that not everyone *does* agree with you about this; I for one don't
see what the big deal is. There isn't a prize system for bug reports.
No-one's keeping track of who files bugs and who 'won' in terms of
reporting the bug first. You don't lose any points if your report gets
closed as a dupe of someone else's. There just isn't a 'respect' issue
here, as far as I can see, which you seem to assume is the case. When
there are duplicate reports and someone cleans them up and fixes the
bug, that's a *good* thing. I can see an argument here for keeping the
older bug open as a bug against xorg, as the fix to pyxf86config kinda
works around an underlying bug in xorg which hasn't gone away (someone's
explained this in the bug thread) - but that's just a plain technical
discussion. I really don't see why it ought to make anyone get hot under
the collar.

So, once more for the cheap seats: *why* do you think closing an older
bug as a dupe of a newer one is a respect issue? What's the big problem
with it?

> As the subject says, I see no point in further bother.
> -- 
> "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
> words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)
> 
>   Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
> 
> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/rudeweb.html

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net