Re: How Debian should handle users requests?
Abou Al Montacir <abou.almontacir@sfr.fr> writes:
> The first reaction is to open a bug, a reaction I find natural and sane.
> But the maintainer closes immediately the bug without even asking for
> additional information. The user tries to figure out what is wrong and
> opens another bug. And finally both DD and user get frustrated.
>
> I'd like to bring this issue to d-d@l.d.o list in order to rich a
> consensus about good conduct when treating bugs. I was myself in several
> cases treated the same way and see some maintainers closing my bugs
> because they don't have the issue on their machines, or because they
> dont care of my use case. On my side I don't do this for my packages. i
> consider each problem report worth investigating and if I'm not
> interested in hunting such issue, I try to help the user doing so.
>
> It is probably kind of arrogance to think that a bug report is silly and
> is not worth spending our valuable time to understand its cause. One may
> argue that a ticket shall be open on real bugs, but here we don't even
> know if it is one. Maybe it is, so let's give time to the user
> investigating, and if he can not do it himself, give him hints.
>
> I'd really like having a king of code of conduct for bug handling, just
> like we have one for mailing lists.
We have several forums for user support requests, the main one being
debian-user@l.d.o. The bts "general" pseudopackage is not a user support
forum. The consensus for dealing with user support requests being filed
as "general" bugs has always been "close the bug and instruct the user
to contact a support forum, mainly debian-user". When what the user is
seeing turns out to be a bug in some package debian-user can also help
with producing an actionable bug report against that package. Perhaps
this needs to be documented more prominently?
--
Arto Jantunen
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