Re: On maintainers not responding to bugs
* Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> [070226 11:05]:
> Stripping KDE, php, xorg, gnome, iceweasel, the libc out of stable
> would indeed make releases a lot less painful.
xorg just sees activitiy to look at bugs (and it was really overdue),
libc is a beast of itself. For the others I have no strong preference,
and if we cannot even garantee that someone looks at the bugs, why put
them in stable?
> Also consider that in the huge mass of bugs, for any of the mentioned
> packages, I'd say 25 to 50% of the bugs are just either invalid or long
> gone.
That is even more a reason to look into them. More old invalid bugs
means more time for submitters to search for their bug. Which means
either more duplicates, less times for submitters to invest into bug
reports making things easy.
> Those teams do an amazing job dealing with the most urgent bugs,
> _AND_ keeping up with upstream. Because such packages aren't supported
> very long, because upstreams have the same man power issues, and they
> only support _some_ releases, if we do not keep up, then it means
> putting an unbearable pressure over the already quite loaded security
> team.
Hey, I was speaking about not releasing such packages at all (perhaps
except libc and the kernel (at least until hurd is ready ;->)). So
no problem at that front. After all, if noone reads the bug reports
anway, how should one find security relevant ones?
> Could we go back to sanity and reality, please ?
I'm also against putting a such a automatism as suggested in.
(Especially as it can be easily circumvented). It's better to help
than to punish. (What about forcing NMs to take a look at a dozen
bugs in high-profile packages not yet answered, trying to verify them
and collect some data on them?)
But in all sanity, saying you cannot cope with bug-reports is no reason
at all that the package should be released in its current form but only
a reason against it. I'm not suggesting that should be done, but that
it is the only logical conclusion from your argument.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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