bugzilla.redhat.com vs upstream bug trackers

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:55:57 +0000, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:

> Because if you cannot properly maintain the component in the 
> distribution the community is better of without it.

Such rude comments don't meet the "be excellent to eachother" guidelines
anymore, I'm afraid. Stop here, please.

> > [Jeffrey Ollie]
> >
> > 1)  There's a 99.999% chance that I don't have the resources (either
> > hardware or software) to reproduce the bug.
> 
> Then you should not be maintaining that component

Hmmm, I find what Jeffrey has written above is phrased in an unfortunate
way and may be misunderstood. But actually, for some types of software
there is a higher rate of bugs which one cannot reproduce (or one isn't
told how to reproduce the issue - e.g. ABRT makes it easy for users to
dump such reports into bugzilla), and the backtrace isn't sufficient
either to draw conclusions, and the reporter doesn't mention that other
programs crash in the same way due to hardware instabilities.
Enough upstreams ignore forwarded bug reports which lack details and where
_they_ feel that they won't be able to reproduce the issue and where
_they_ don't see a connection to mistakes in the code. In other cases
they would ask with NEEDINFO queries, but downstream (in Fedora bz), 
the reporter doesn't respond. Spending time on such tickets is a waste
of time.

> > 2) There's a 100% chance that I don't have the time between work and
> > family obligations.
> 
> 
> We do not need unresponsive or poor maintained packages in the 
> distribution and if there is really need or demand for the component you 
> maintain, co-maintainers will appear or people to pick it up if you drop 
> it so if you dont have the time to properly maintain your component(s) 
> in the distribution then either find yourself co-maintainers or drop the 
> package.

You forget upstream's part. The software (and the packages) may work well
enough for enough users to justify offering them in the package collection.
The next release may fix lurking bugs, because one single user has shown
enough interest and effort in helping with getting a bug fixed. The "user"
may be the Fedora packager, but it's better if more users support the
software (and packages) like that.

-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat) - Linux 3.9.5-301.fc19.x86_64
loadavg: 0.01 0.05 0.05