On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 05:59:35AM +0000, benfoley scribbled: [snip] > > And anyone who thinks the only reason their pet minor bug would be > > allowed to languish in the BTS is a "lazy or incompetent maintainer" > > needs a reality check. > > sorry, you're wrong. the complaint is entirely valid. and i say this with the > utmost sympathy for those who do more than i can. why is manoj pissed? why is > colin putting his packages up for adoption? why is the next release > struggling its way to fruition? See, just the same as Manoj you seem to have completely missed (or ignored?) the real point of the whole thread and the problem it discusses. You are talking about quality, high standards, attitude etc. etc. But, part of the quality of Debian comes from the quality of the bug reports as well. You probably know perfectly that a good question is 50% of an answer. So if a bug report (being a question in this case) is badly formed, doesn't contain enough clue as to what the reporting party thinks might be wrong with the subject of the report, then even the smartest (and the least lazy) person in charge of the package cannot solve the issue. So, if we talk about quality we must extend it also to the bug reports, questions, complaints. And that issue was (at least as far as I am concerned and I was writing about it) the merit of this thread - that the original bug report wasn't good enough, its quality was too low to be useful. > >The rhetoric expended on this thread in > > upbraiding maintainers for the poor job they're doing of package > > maintenance could have been much better spent on providing patches (or > > at least suggestions) in some of those bugs that had been filed -- since > > clearly everyone involved in this thread has English fluency to spare, > > which can not be said of DDs as a whole. > > > > here's a suggestion. either open up the packaging system to allow non-novice > users to review package description, or accept the bug reportage of late. The bugs were accepted and, note, that there were few complaints about filing the bugs itself. Most of them dealt with the low quality of the report. And, for the record, Javier is working hard to fix his mistake right now - instead of idling around here and venting your frustration, you (a general "you") should move your four letters and get on to work with Javier. [snip] > > given package in other respects are also least likely to be able to > > identify those traits that render their package descriptions problematic > > for users unfamiliar with the package. So if you want good package > > descriptions, don't complain -- help. > > the problem there is that, for users, we generally don't get to see package > descriptions before the package has been released. i would bet anything that > the majority of debian users run whatever is stable, at least on critical > machines, at any given time, and the problem i have with this notion that > such users should be made responsible for the failed responsibility of a > package maintainer is that the argument simply makes no sense. we don't get > to question policy. we rely on policy. if you don't adhere to it, we have > nothing to rely on. Well, I've got a feeling that there are quite a few users like yourself who read debian-devel and (possibly) other developer mailing lists and you have every opportunity (and are more than welcome) to check the descriptions as soon as they hit unstable (or even the incoming queue) > as for helping, as much as you seem to think that complaint is antithetical > to help, what i've taken the time to write here is proposed as help. i think But see, nobody said that the bugs that were filed were unethical. In fact, I think Steve, myself and others agree that filling such bugs is necessary, but given the scale and the nature of them they must be prepared with extreme care and with the highest quality. As somebody said - not all developers (probably even the minority of them) are native English speakers so every person that can help with the READMEs, descriptions, manpages written by non-native English speakers is worth his weight in gold. Another thing is submitting descriptions in your native language - that way you add value to the distribution _and_ test the quality of the descriptions. Time wasted to write the mails in this thread could be spent writing 3 or 4 descriptions in German in your case. And it would be an very valuable contribution to the OS from a non-developer. regards, marek
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