Re: the new style "mass tirage" of bugs
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 04:53:20PM -0600, John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> was heard to say:
> On Wed February 20 2008 3:43:18 pm Ben Finney wrote:
> > Who other than the bug reporter would you suggest should try
> > reproducing the bug?
> >
> > Suggesting "put that effort into fixing the bugs" is presuming that
> > the prospective bug fixer knows *which* bugs are worth the effort. If
> > the bug reporter is unresponsive, the bug is unlikely to be resolved
> > anyway because it can't be confirmed fixed.
> >
> >
> > What would you put in place of triage?
>
> I think that the point is that triage should happen at *submission* time, not
> so long later.
>
> I have learned that certain well-known packages (OpenOffice, say) are bug
> blackholes. I submit a bug, and never hear anything from Debian maintainers
> except for periodic triage stuff when a new upstream comes out.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in the case of aptitude, I have
just about enough free time to keep up with bugs.
The problem is that I sometimes want to spend my free time on other
things, such as hanging out with my girlfriend, enjoying the outdoors,
cleaning my apartment, etc. And of course if I ever do anything related
to the project that's not strictly bug-fixing (say, writing new code,
improving documentation, or writing messages to mailing lists like
I'm doing right now), I also fall behind. Oh, and fixing bugs that are
nontrivial? That makes me fall behind too if the bug takes more than a
few hours to fix.
I know this makes me a sucky maintainer [0], but I simply don't have more
time and energy than I have. I'm totally in awe of people who can hold
down a full-time job, have a personal life, and still devote tons of time
to Debian and be uber-maintainers. I don't know how they manage it.
Daniel
[0] http://alioth.debian.org/~fjp/log/posts/aptitude_upload_not_something_to_be_proud_of.html
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