Re: Forwarding bugs upstream
Quoth Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>, on 2011-01-12 01:59:03 +0100:
> > If a bug is not readily reproducible or isolatable, it may be
> > necessary to pass it over to an upstream maintainer who will know
> > what further questions to ask. But they need to send those
> > questions to the user, not to the Debian maintainer. In the kernel
> > team, we often ask users to report bugs upstream for that reason.
>
> Ditto on the X side. Having a low-power proxy between developers and
> users is quite a bad idea (induces delays and higher load).
I tend to think what would be ideal in such cases is for the package
maintainer to go through the overhead motions of forwarding that
require a heavy context switch (i.e., setting the ball rolling) and
then subscribe the user to the relevant bug by email or some other
similar communication mechanism.
Which upstream bug trackers, if any, would make the above not work?
Here I'm ignoring things like maintainer time to do the forwarding,
assuming that that can be analyzed separately. Mainly I'm wondering
about cases where the user essentially _can't_ communicate about the
bug directly without going through rigamarole to "create an account"
first or thereabouts; is this common? If so, and assuming it's much
more expensive for the user to switch into "bug reporting" context, I
find it likely that many users would give up at that point rather than
having to report the bug a second time after having already expended
the context switch effort to report it once.
---> Drake Wilson
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