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Re: Who gets an email when with bugreports [was: Re: Unauthorised activity surrounding tbb package]



On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 05:14:18PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> People often file bugs for issues they discover in software they don't
> use or care about, getting followups to those isn't necessary.

Uh? What's your rationale for this, and in particular for the "often"
part?

Surely the typical use case for a bug report is "I use this software ->
this feature doesn't work -> I submit a bug report"? That is the use
case we should optimize for, because taking the risk of leaving out the
original bug submitter from conversations around that bug increase
friction in the bug fixing process, in turn reducing the quality of our
distro.

The main use cases of someone reporting a bug against software they
don't use is quality-assurance activities. Which is clearly a very
important activity, but we should not optimize for it.

I've done my share of QA work in Debian, including mass bug filing, but
my gut feeling is that still, 90% of the bugs I've reported to Debian
throughout all my life are against software that I use and care about.

(Clearly, we should not make the QA use case needlessly painful. Hence
I'm all for the opt-out mechanism you and Don discussed in another part
of the thread. But I'm convinced that we should optimize for the other
use case.)

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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