On bug reporting
Hello!
I would like to know if there are guidelines for bug reporting: I use
debian unstable, and I find bugs, but I don't report most of them for many
reasons.
I've never discussed these reasons with anyone. Now I would like to.
I identified until now three kind of such unreported bugs:
- Evident bugs
I work mainly offline, so I don't have constant access to
bugs.debian.org, and usually can't know when a bug has already been
reported.
When I find a bug in a package that is likely to already have been
reported, I don't do it to avoid the possibility of flooding the bug
database with reduntant reports.
An example of this is when tar changed behaviour of the 'I' switch, or
when a package can't be upgraded due to missing dependancies (like
glademm, erlang and wordtrans are now), or when a package keeps redoing
the same debconf questions on most updates.
I only report these bugs when I see the problem persisting after a week
or two. Should I always report it, instead?
- Pedantic bugs
Sometimes I notice something that should be different, but I don't know
if it is to be considered as a bug, and I don't report it.
For example, packages like skipstone, or powermanga or lxdoom appear in
the Debian menus but not in the Gnome menus (is there a policy for
Gnome menus?), or alsa doesn't load oss-emulation modules on demand
with kernel 2.4.0+devfs (are packages supposed to correctly cope with
devfs?)
Should I be on the safe side and risk reporting a non-bug, or should I
be on the other safe side and risk non-reporting a bug?
- Non-Debian small bugs
Sometimes I find small bugs that are clearly to be reported upstream,
like wrong i18n translations (many, many, many of them), usability
quirks or even usability suggestions, that I don't report upstream
because I can't quickly find the address of the right person, and
there's not an handy tool like `bug' for them, or there is, but is
online, or there is, offline, but I don't know how to launch it,
because every program has its own.
It would be very handy to file a `whishlist' bug to the Debian BTS,
knowing they are eventually reported upstream, but I don't do it to
avoid flooding the BTS with non-debian-related items.
Could the Debian BTS be used as a proxy service to upstream mantainers
(considering that with debian-native packages it already is supposed to
collect these kind of reports anyway) or we should wait for the
development of a different common bug reporting system for such little
issues?
I would like to hear your opinion on this behaviours, to get out of Doubt
into The Right Way (TM) to report bugs.
Bye! Enrico
--
GPG public key available on finger -l zinie@cs.unibo.it
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