Re: Bug#837606: general: system freeze
Abou Al Montacir <abou.almontacir@sfr.fr> writes:
> We are here facing a bug that appears only on some devices. The issue is
> tricky and the user does not have the skills to debug. The duty of the
> project is to help him investigating the right way so that the bug get
> solved.
No, it's not.
I hate to be this blunt about this, but I think you're laboring under some
serious confusions about what the Debian project is, and in fact this is
exactly why I don't like the general bug category.
The Debian project is absolutely not promising to, responsible for, or
even intending to help users debug problems with Debian. Individual
contributors may *volunteer* to do this, but this is not something that we
promise in any way, and it's not something that users should expect.
This sounds harsh, but it's simply the reality of limited volunteer hours,
millions of users, and resource constraints. We cannot provide this
service. You'll find that nearly all commercial software companies with
full-time paid support staff *also* cannot provide this service because it
is *incredibly* time-intensive and expensive.
You *cannot* expect volunteers to do this type of "take all questions"
customer support for poorly-defined problems. There are a very small
number of people who enjoy doing this and might volunteer to do it for
free, but the vast majority of people do not enjoy it and burn out on it
very quickly. They are not going to do this work on their volunteer time.
If you want to promise to provide that, you *have* to pay people, usually
quite a lot of people, and usually a fair bit of money unless you want
minimally-trained people who are only following a script.
The Debian project will never provide this, and we should not give the
impression that we will. It's simply not a goal of the project nor is it
something we have resources to do.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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