Re: On maintainers not responding to bugs

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> writes:

> cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:
> > people are more likely to help you fix a problem if they are
> > directly affected by it (cause people tend to scratch their own
> > itches).
>
> That's the theory. My experience for KDE bugs, is that something
> like 60 to 75% of the bug submitters do not answer to more-info
> requests, or precisions requests. It's true even if you answer in
> the couple of weeks after the submission.

So, in your experience, 25% to 40% of bug submitters *do* answer
more-info requests? That seems quite a good response rate to me.

You present this in response to "people are more likely to help you
fix a problem if they are directly affected by it". Are you suggesting
that people who are *not* directly affected by a bug are 25% to 40%
likely to answer a more-info request?

>   My opinion on this matter is that _users_ (to be opposed to
> developers) don't really care, it's fire and forget reporting.

Anecdotally, I'd agree that many bug submitters fit this profile. So
we should increase the likelihood that people who *do* care can know
that they are doing the right thing by submitting quality bug reports,
even if the fix is a long time in coming.

-- 
 \      "[...] a Microsoft Certified System Engineer is to information |
  `\     technology as a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to the |
_o__)                            culinary arts."  -- Michael Bacarella |
Ben Finney