Re: Debian does not have customers
Bart Schouten <list@xenhideout.nl> writes:
> I think the point that people are trying to get across is that a lot of
> what you say Russ feels like excuses.
An excuse is when you know you should do something but aren't going to do
so, and are trying to justify that decision to oneself. That's not the
disagreement here; rather, we have a very fundamental disagreement over
what people should do.
You believe that I should be doing certain things in bug management, and I
don't agree with you. It's not an excuse for me to tell you that I'm not
going to do the thing you want me to do because I think you're wrong. :)
It's a way for me to say "I don't agree with you and you haven't convinced
me."
I'm not really sure how much point there is in continuing to discuss this,
since I don't think either of us are particularly likely to change each
other's minds. I hear what you're saying about what you believe people's
perceptions are. I don't agree that this is how our bug system is
designed, that those perceptions are a particularly serious problem in
Debian, or that any change is really needed here. It's not that I'm not
hearing you; it's just that I don't agree.
If we had some other state in our bug system other than closed that also
gets the bug off my view and makes it disappear from the various tracking
statistics on, say, the Debian package tracker that I'm trying to keep
clean, I would probably use it because I'm kind of obsessive about
classifying things. If you give me a classification system, I'll probably
try to use all of it, even if that's not a particularly good use of my
time. :) So in that sense I'm agnostic about whether we want to spell
"this bug is highly unlikely to get fixed" as "closed" or as "on-hold" or
as something else. If someone changed the BTS, I'd shrug and change what
I do. But I don't feel like this is necessary or particularly important.
What is important to me are two points: one, that we (as much as possible;
this is hard, for all the reasons pointed out in this thread) tell people
if their bugs are unlikely to ever be looked at if this is the case rather
than just silently ignoring them, and two, that we be very clear that the
existence of a bug (particularly a non-RC bug) does not create an
obligation for the maintainer to fix it.
We all want to fix bugs, but we do that as part of a volunteer project;
people aren't always going to have time, energy, or desire, and that has
to be okay, or we will lose the volunteer efforts of people who would be
able to contribute occasional work but who don't want to incur the
obligations of letting Debian maintainer work turn into a second job.
(And yes, that means that we should be much more open to NMUs and change
our historical baggage around that. Please NMU my packages if there are
bugs I'm not getting to! Although ideally talk to me first, since there
may be design reasons why I didn't fix the bug, not just an issue of
insufficient time.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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