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Re: contacting all bug reporters for a package?



On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 10:15:33PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> 
> On 19/12/16 21:57, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 11:11:27AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> >>
> >> Is there any easy way to contact everybody who made a bug report against
> >> a package and ask them to check if the latest upload fixes it?  Or is
> >> there any script for maintainers to do this?
> > 
> > I would expect the majority of your users observed the bug on an 
> > (often production) system running jessie or older stable.
> > 
> > It is not possible for such users to try random packages from unstable.
> 
> Well, if it really deserves to graduate from unstable to the next stable
> release, somebody is going to have to test it sooner or later.
> Hopefully sooner.  In my own environment I observed that NFS on jessie
> was less reliable than on wheezy.

People running production systems with hundreds of thousands of users 
are definitely not the ones who should test packages from unstable in
these environments.

> >> If somebody has opened 2 ore more bugs maybe they may prefer to only
> >> receive a single email summarizing all their bugs for that package.
> >>
> >> For example, nfs-utils has over 100 active bug reports and although I
> >> spent some time updating it I'm not keen to go through all the bugs one
> >> by one.
> >> ...
> > 
> > Are you fully committed to spend time debugging every problem where
> > a user confirmed that it is still present?
> 
> I don't think I ever promised that.

If you are not willing to promise that, what is the point in asking 
people to spend their time on reproducing?

> However, if users confirm problems
> that should really be release critical, then that gives the release team
> greater visibility about which packages are really ready going into the
> freeze.

Talking about release critical bugs only distracts from the majority of 
bugs that might be pretty fatal in some environments but are not release 
critical.

> > It might take a user hours (or even days) to verify whether a problem is 
> > still present.
> > 
> > It would be a very evil if a user would spend effort after such an 
> > email, but the next he hears from the maintainer would be another
> > such request to try the then-latest version a year later.
> 
> I hope the people who try things will engage with the community as a
> whole (including upstream) and not only rely on a single maintainer.

Asking submitters to reproduce only makes sense if *you* intend to 
further debug all problems confirmed to still be present in the latest
version.

When *you* ask someone to spend effort to reproduce a problem, then that
person can expect that *you* will also spend some effort on that problem
afterwards.

Never forget that due to your request to reproduce people might be 
spending days on setting up an environment for testing whether the bug 
you asked them to re-test is still present in the version you asked them 
to test.

> Regards,
> 
> Daniel

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed


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