Re: [all candidates] Removing or limiting DD rights?
I'm going to move this fully onto -project, since we're into the voting
phase and I think this is more of a general project discussion at this
point. Hope that doesn't lose anyone.
Chris Knadle <Chris.Knadle@coredump.us> writes:
> Good question.
> I can say this: Debian's BTS is the only bug tracker in which I've ever
> gotten a bug quickly closed without any explanation. Bugs in Debian's
> BTS also tend to be "a bit more argumentative" than other bug trackers,
> IMHO. [This is not necessarily negative.]
That's good perspective, thank you! I don't interact with the bug
trackers of a lot of other projects and mostly end up looking at them when
someone points me at something controversial, which produces a skewed
impression.
I've had very positive interactions with Debian's bug tracker and don't
recall ever having a bug closed without an explanation, but I'm sure that
has something to do with the fact that I'm visibly part of the project and
people may recognize my name, so I don't necessarily see the same thing an
average user would.
> However these exceptions aside, bugs in the Debian BTS that I deal with
> get solved far more often than external bug trackers I've dealt with,
> and a lot of the maintainers seem like really good people who are
> simultaneously quite knowledgable. So if there's discussion open at
> all, it usually works out one way or another. Thus "the catch" seems to
> be getting that far in the first place for the minority of bugs where
> that's an issue. [And I won't get into the exceptions to the
> exceptions.]
The problem that we always have with any sort of social protocol is that
the project is huge and has a lot of people with, effectively, admin
rights to things, and not all of them are going to be on the same social
page or even listening to any of the discussions. So it's hard to effect
change. One can try to lead by example and set an overall tone, but there
are always going to be parts of the project that won't even see the
examples.
I do think that debian-mentors helps a great deal here, not just in
helping people with their problems but in modeling a social interaction
style for people who are new to the project. It is, by and large, quite
polite and constructive (often much more so than debian-devel), and I
think that matters. People take cues for expected social behavior from
their early interactions with a community.
> That's interesting. That sounds like an improvement in this area. If
> you happen to know when that was implemented, I'd be interested. June
> of last year I saw a bug closed (marked as done, without explanation)
> where I didn't see any email sent to the BTS control@ address in the
> bug, so I was confused as to how the bug was closed. Would emailing
> -done do that?
It was quite some time ago. Mail to -done would have been copied to you
as the submitter, so if you didn't see any mail, something else happened,
I assume. However, given that you didn't even see any mail to control,
I'm not sure what happened. Whatever mail message closed the bug is going
to be logged in the bug, whether a reply to it or a message to control.
> Lately I've sort of avoided [debian-devel] because some of the
> discussions there can be somewhat vitriolic.
Yeah, and it's possible that asking about a bug would break into a
vitriolic debate if people disagreed about the handling of it. However, I
would be surprised if any of that vitriol were aimed at *you* as the
person to raise the issue; it's more likely that people would start
yelling at each other. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: