* Juliusz Chroboczek (jch@pps.jussieu.fr) wrote: > > Also node that many bugs are sometimes hard to reproduce, because you > > need a very specific environment that the maintainer not always have > > (e.g. the issue I have is that as a glibc maintainer, I've no large > > enough and used pam-ldap or NIS setups, and we have some bugs that rot > > because I don't have either the time or the resource to test them > > properly). > > I have no problem with the maintainer (a human being) asking me to do > something sensible about my bug report, such as confirming that the > bug still happens with the version in experimental, testing on a setup > he doesn't have access to, producing a backtrace, running random > commands on my system (as long as I understand what they do) etc. > > 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. So it isn't the maintainers who are doing this, but Lior. He asked if he could help and of course we said yes. I didn't vet (nor do I believe Mike did) the messages he sent out, nor do I really think we should have. Now that I've done some blame deflection, I really appreciate Lior work but I agree that narrowing the search criteria would make this a bit less spammy. Let me try to summarize some of the constructive ideas brought up in the thread. + Bugs marked unreproducible and lacking response from the submitter should very likely be closed. + Bugs with severity < normal, bugs forwarded upstream and bugs marked confirmed should probably not receive emails or perhaps just helpful reminders of its existence if the bug is older than X. + Better metrics should be come up with based on age of the bug, most recent "found" version and last activity on the bug. Not sure exactly what numbers to plug in, bug those seem like good indicators of continued relevance. + Maybe only sending a single email to a submitter with multiple open bugs. I think with some improvements like this there would reduce the false positive rate a lot. While it would be great to treat every bug individually by a human, the amount of bugs is really unmanageable and hugely time consuming by the small group of maintainers. These sort of automated reminders are a big help, even if they're not perfect yet. -- Eric Dorland <eric@kuroneko.ca> ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: hooty@jabber.com 1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6
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