What does one do about a package maintainer with an attitude problem?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2013 15:26:43 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:

> The maintainer in question has been active on bugzilla (as noted 
> previously, he closed two other bugs of mine with INSUFFICIENT_DATA) 
> /after/ I posted the reproduction steps, so it seems clear that were he 
> planning on reopening the ABRT ticket based on my additional posted 
> information, he would have already done so.

You cannot be sure that the assignee (or a co-maintainer) won't reopen the
ticket later, e.g. when noticing a bugzilla notification in a special mail
folder. It could even be that the ticket has been closed by mistake.

> In the past, I have been yelled at rather aggressively by some package 
> maintainers for reopening tickets which I felt were closed inappropriately.

Aggressively? That's sad to hear, but again, it would need a concrete
example before one could judge about it.
 
> Certainly not all package maintainers act that way, but some do, and my 
> recent experience with this particular package maintainers suggests that 
> getting into an CLOSE / OPEN / CLOSE ... back-and-forth with him would 
> not be a wise strategy.

Well, then we disagree. Especially when the tickets get closed without
a rationale (= a real comment and not just the Status/Resolution field),
it would be wise to reopen it at least once and wait for the assignee's
reaction. We're not talking about hours here, but days up to a few weeks
before reaching the conclusion that the ticket gets ignored. Only then
you've got usable input for others (e.g. sponsors or FESCo). And, of 
course, this gets even more interesting when your ticket contains a
solution.