Re: severities of blocking bugs
Stephen Gran <sgran@debian.org> writes:
> This one time, at band camp, Thomas Bushnell BSG said:
>> Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>>
>> > Most maintainers are much more cooperative when you tag the bug as
>> > +patch and say something like:
>>
>> How do you think I should have applied this advice in the case of bug
>> #360851?
>
> In the same way Martin and others handled 357057? That's because
> he wanted a compiler version transition, and he worked hard for it,
> finding out all the problems and filing bugs with patches. Does this
> help answer your question?
No, because when I asked for the status of the work, I received *NOT A
SINGLE REPLY FROM THE MAINTAINER*. How on earth am I supposed to help
with the transition, when a simple question "what's the state of the
transition?" is *ENTIRELY IGNORED*?
Moreover, I wasn't even asking for the work to be stepped up or
anything else. All I wanted was *SOME* idea of the plan. Even the
statement, "We have no plan unfortunately" would have been helpful
(and then I could say "What can I do to help out?").
> When you make a wishlist bug RC, you are by definition forcing someone
> else to spend time on it, either to fix it or play BTS ping pong with
> you, since their package doesn't need to be kept out of the next stable
> release over a wishlist bug.
The maintainer agrees that it's an important bug, not a wishlist bug.
So let's not pretend that it's wishlist; it's not.
In fact, fixing this bug has already been said by the release team is
a release goal for etch. So, at least in that sense, it *is* release
critical.
Nor did I play ping pong; when the severity was set back to important
(not wishlist), my reaction was to ask debian-devel. And while Steve
and Manoj gave helpful replies that understood the particular case and
the general principles--replies which will help me to do my work more
efficiently and helpfully in the future--Ian and you have given
useless replies, that show no awareness of the particular case or the
general principles.
Indeed, both you and Ian seem to be operating from the standpoint that
bug reports are "demands" and imply some kind of malfeasance on the
part of a maintainer. It is this approach which is harmful to Debian.
Thomas
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