reporting bugs upstream : nothing on the wiki?

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

  On 07/13/2010 08:36 AM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
> This is an interesting idea. I don't think the maintainers themselves
> would have the time to do this. Can this be passed on to the mentors, to
> pass on as an activity for new Ambassadors ;) ? They'll learn too in the
> process, and might end up co-maintaining some packages (which is a good
> thing!). It would be a good idea to have as many people as possible
> exposed to the bug reporting process. Starting with new Ambassadors is
> some what going down to the roots. Comments?
Here again you continue to suggest we should pass the job of what falls 
under the packager duty to someone else in the community because they 
are to incompetent to accept the responsibility and full fill their role 
as a packager/maintainer.

It falls under packagers responsibility to be the bridge between 
upstream and Fedora.

Packagers/maintainers already have upstream bugzilla account and are 
subscripted to various mailing list related to the component they ship.

> Generic instructions for this are available everywhere. This is simple
> and hardly takes a minute. (I don't know how many bugzillas I've joined
> up already)
>

Dont make the assumption that every reporter has the same time, skills 
and patience as you.

We need to nurture the newcomers not the experience once.

The new reporter gradually will get the experience and even start to 
work directly with upstream if the first step is as little as possible.

If it takes him several hours to file a single bug report then that step 
is to steep and we lose a potential report from our community.

Redirecting that reporter upstream seriously complicates that first step.

> Don't we have a policy of staying close to upstream? Are there a lot of
> differences in the upstream package and what fedora ships? I maintain a
> few packages, and they're all same as the upstream source. (just
> curious)
>
> This depends on the bug and cannot be generalized. Bugs that are
> reproducible on all machines will not require this. Upstream will handle
> those (I'm sure they'll be happy to do it themselves than wait for the
> reporter to get back to them , if ever). Machine specific bugs have no
> other solution. If upstream can't reproduce it, it has to rely on the
> reporter for feedback. The maintainer can't do much too here.
>
> Upstreams interested in getting good bug reports do keep a good
> documentation of how to go about it. If they don't, we can't do much,
> it's really their loss. What I'm saying is that we encourage users to go
> all the way to upstream and report bugs rather than stopping at our
> bugzilla. As Jóhann already mentioned, rather forcefully, this is a
> difficult to achieve goal. Even partially achieving it would be an
> improvement IMO

This is a goal we should not waste time and resource trying to achieve.

Reporters themselves will find their way upstream if they care enough 
about the component in question and when they are ready to do so.

JBG