Re: Firefox bugs mass-closed.
On Mon October 1 2007 4:50:10 pm Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 09:34:56PM +0000, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> > What Joey and I are specifically complaining about are three bugs that
> > we have described in enough detail and that are trivial to reproduce.
> > The maintainer did not send us personal mail asking for help; he sent
> > us an automated mass mailing threatening to discard our perfectly
> > valid reports unless we take some arbitrary action.
> >
> > This is clearly not the case that you are describing.
>
> I'm trying to discuss a sensible default pinging mechanism for bugs
> that matters the most. And the fact that the bug is trivial to reproduce
> is irrelevant: when it's one bug among 1000 others, you don't have the
> time to check if this particular one is fixed or not.
As a maintainer and a user, I have often wondered lately if the practice of
tracking numerous upstream bugs in the Debian BTS is something that should
be ended. We nominally do this out of convenience to our users. However, I
have found response time from Debian maintainers for upstream bugs, on
average, to be extremely bad, and that most never get forwarded to the
upstream BTS. As a maintainer, I must admit to not always being prompt with
upstream bugs myself. When I have an active upstream, it is annoying to act
as a human proxy when the issue could be best handled through them directly
anyway.
I have received a number of pings lately similar to the one that sparked this
thread. Some for bugs many years old that never received any attention
whatsoever. All were upstream bugs.
As a rule, I try to never report upstream bugs to the Debian BTS anymore
because it is a blackhole in so many cases.
Perhaps we should be providing tools to let users find the appropriate
upstream BTS for upstream bugs, rather than burdening our maintainers with
being a human proxy? I suspect we will provide better response for the
users and a better BTS for maintainers.
Of course, the question is how to determine what's an upstream bug. Perhaps
we could still receive reports in our Debian BTS, but provide some automated
tools to send them on to popular types of upstream BTSs, and then close the
Debian report with a pointer to the upstream location?
-- John
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