On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 02:36:46PM +0200, Josip Rodin scribbled: > On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 03:12:16AM +0200, Marek Habersack wrote: > > > Sure, I could down load all these packages, and learn about > > > them, and write up the patches, but what in gods good name has the > > > maintainer signed up to do? > > > > Don't you think that it's plain rude to point fingers, say "your work > > sucks, it's bad" and then walk away? > > Uh, that's not what happens. RTFM on how the bug tracking system works. It I exaggerated, of course, but for a purpose - to demonstrate the sentiment some people might have. > doesn't always work by people filing perfect bug reports. It doesn't always > work by people doing all the work for you and submitting correct patches. > (And in other news, life sucks, too.) You're right, but one or two useless bug reports is fine, but a flood of them is not particularily useful. > > Especially that in quite a few cases he was wrong - blind firing will > > always hit some target. There were just too many duds in that shooting. > > Arguably, yes. Your point being? Do you argue that maintainers should not > have to close bug reports that they think are closeable? (They need to be > given a magic wand that does that for them, too?) My point is that if one considers mass bug filing, they should consider putting more work into it and prepare the bug reports more carefully before filing them. And in this case, I think mass bug filing was not the best choice since the matter at stake was/is quite package-specific. > Seriously though, don't act surprised when you see that there's people who > disagree with extremely terse descriptions enough to file error-prone mass > bugs. Javier found some 700 oneliner long descriptions. Let me repeat that > again: seven hundred. That's a whole lot of oneliners if you ask me, even > if they are all cooler than liquid nitrogen. It's a lot, but, alas, grep isn't AI yet and it cannot judge the content. We saw several examples where one-liners were more than adequate when coupled with other information at hand (short description, package name for instance). Let's just say this - the cause was good, the medium chosen was good, but the style and the way of doing was poor. Look at what's happening now - Javier has just started going over the list of over 700 (754 IIRC?) bugs to help the maintainers see what might be wrong with it. He doubled his work - that is enough of a proof that the way it was done was not right. And that's what my rant is all about, really. regards, marek
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