Re: What bug reports are for
Hi, Ian:
En fecha Martes, 1 de Marzo de 2011, Ian Jackson escribió:
> Jesús M. Navarro writes ("Re: What bug reports are for"):
> > Hi, Josselin:
> > > You seem to forget the very reason bug reports are here. Their point is
> > > not to offer a service to our users - if you want that, you?ll need
> > > paid support. Bug reports are here to help improving the distribution.
> >
> > Good to know.
> >
> > Is *that* Debian's official position? That the bug report system is
> > not there to offer a service to Debian users?
>
> Debian doesn't have an "official position" on this question. But I
> would guess it is the position of the vast majority of Debian's
> maintainers.
>
> This has been standard wisdom for Free Software for decades now. See
> for example this extract from the GNU "Information for Maintainers"
> document:
>
> The main purpose of bug reports is to help you contribute to the
> community by improving the next version of the program. Many of the
> people who report bugs don't realize this-they think that the point is
> for you to help them individually. Some will ask you to focus on that
> instead of on making the program better. If you comply with their
> wishes, you will have been distracted from the job of maintaining the
> program.
>
> ...
>
> When people ask you to put your time into helping them use the
> program, it may seem "helpful" to do what they ask. But it is much
> less helpful than improving the program, which is the maintainer's
> real job.
Please pay attention that those are related to upstream maintainers, not
developers; it is doubtful that it can be of application to packagers, since
packager's self-appointed duty is for the software to be easily accesable and
integrated for the user (were it not the case, the end user could simply take
the tarball directly from the developer).
And with regards of Debian and the thread at hand, maybe there's not an official
position on what the bug tracking system exactly is for but certainly there's
quite an interesting document you may have some notice of: Debian Social
Contract, points 3 and 4.
(/me fastly ducks away after having the balls of telling *that* to Ian Jackson
no less)
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