[OT] Deafening silence

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 16:38 -0800, Russell Miller wrote:
> On Saturday 13 March 2010 03:47:52 pm Craig White wrote:

> I am not a typical user.  I have been a sysadmin for 12 years.  I have a 
> general idea of how a good bug reporting and triaging system should work.  
> When I submitted a bug that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was a bug and 
> got told it wasn't, I wasn't very happy.  When I made my case that, yes, it is 
> a bug, and got told that my report wasn't valid because I put it in the wrong 
> place, I wasn't very happy either.  I understand that it's run by volunteers 
> but at some point even volunteers should be able to move a bug from one 
> package to another, it takes the same amount of time as closing it.
----
not all 'packagers' have the same workload or attitude and often, the
quality and relevance of the bug report probably has a large impact on
how it is dealt with.

I hope that your conclusions weren't based upon a single bad experience
bug reporting. I can assure you that I have made probably 50 reports,
some of them mostly ignored, some of them dismissed, and many of them
acted upon and resolved. Even the best batters in baseball don't get a
hit 4 our 10 times at the plate.
----
> 
> > There are people who light candles and people who curse the darkness.
> > 
> Yes, and there are people who light candles and have them blown out 
> repeatedly.  After a certain amount of time, the candles stop getting lit.
> 
> > Marcel is like a broken record - rehashing the same things he groused
> > about last week as if yet another 2000 words on the same topics is going
> > to be any less of a waste of electrons this week. But I didn't say that
> > he was irrelevant or that everything he said was irrelevant. His rants
> > are irrelevant.
> > 
> I see, I somehow stuck myself in the middle of a flame war.  Fair enough.  I 
> follow the list in a middling manner and only read things that pop out at me.
----
don't leap to conclusions. There's no flame war but I keep hoping that
he would recognize that ranting to the list is entirely unproductive and
just gets his name added to more and more 'kill' lists. His instincts
for identifying problems are poor, his ability to articulate the
problems are average and his understanding of the open source world
seems to be non-existent.
----
> > Yes, Fedora is imperfect... it's also an imperfect world. If he or
> > anyone else needs help with a specific issue, they are almost always
> > handled expeditiously. But if he or someone else wants to draw big
> > picture issues, they should at least understand something about open
> > source development, software packaging, the origins, the process, etc.
> > Otherwise, they are irrelevant.
> > 
> Never in my case.  Make of it what you will.
> 
> But the person who said "if you're so unsatisfied with fedora find another one 
> you like" may have a point after all.  I'm not unsatisfied with Fedora, but who 
> knows, maybe ubuntu, etc., has a better community.  Shrug.  It's a futile 
> conversation anyway.  My lone voice isn't going to change anything.
----
it wasn't me that said that but I invite anyone and everyone to check
out other Linux distributions to see what their communities and their
packaging/integration/etc. is like. I do that myself.

As for the community, I suppose that depends upon what your expectations
are from the community as to whether it is any better or worse. But they
all have places to report bugs and places to request help and when you
confuse the community mail list with a bug reporting tool, you're going
to encounter push back at any community. If you use the community mail
list for a soap box to rant about the state of Linux in general, it's
likely going to be poorly received even if you actually know what you
are talking about. That's what blogs are for.

Craig


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