what's the point of filing bugs against Fedora?

[Darryl L. Pierce]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 09:24:00AM -0800, pgaltieri . wrote:
> I'm asking this question out of frustration.  What's the point of filing
> bugs against Fedora at bugzilla.redhat.com when the response I get is "ask
> up stream they can help you"?
> 
> I filed a bug (1040518) against the Mate desktop, and was told to ask
> upstream for help because they can help me.  I don't understand this.  I
> installed Mate from the Fedora DVD and I therefore expect the Fedora
> engineers to act as buffer between me and upstream.  It should be their
> responsibility to work with the Mate engineers, not mine.

Their responsibility is in taking the upstream and packaging it for ease
of installation by the Fedora users.

*IF* they can help with marshalling bugs upstream, then great! If they
actually work with the upstream (as some of us do), even better!

But a lot of packagers are just that: packagers. Not developers. If you
file a bug that's not against packaging process itself then there may
not be much they can do for you except to say, "Sorry, can you take this
to the actual developers to work on?"

Though, IMO, they should participate in that as well so that, when a fix
is found, they can add it to the package.

> I've done tech support for Linux for many years.  Do you know how long I
> would have lasted if I told one of my customers "Oh, it's a kernel bug, go
> ask Linus I'm sure he can help you" ?  I guarantee you not very long.

Fedora packagers aren't paid. It's not a job. It's a service they're
providing *for free*.

>  It
> was my responsibility to work with whoever I needed to to fix the
> customer's problem, but the customer dealt with me until the problem was
> fixed.

A packager's job is to package code, not write it or fix the bugs.

-- 
Darryl L. Pierce <mcpierce at gmail.com>
http://mcpierce.fedorapeople.org/
"What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
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