policy/philosophy: bugs that depend on input files
I recently filed a bug with, in my opinion, quite sufficient
documentation. At least the level of documentation was such that had
been routinely accepted with other bugs I'd filed in the past. In a
subsequent update, I even enclosed all the input files that caused the
erroneous behaviour, verbatim. Nonetheless, the maintainer closed the
bug with a dismissive and supercilious comment (on record in the BTS),
citing as reason that the input files "are not part of Debian".
Now, the package in question is a development package, a kind of
compiler, one might say. Imagine hitting a bug in gcc, like the one
that made all Linux kernels redundantly include -fno-strength-reduce
in CFLAGS for eternity, documenting it with the C source and the
erroneus assembly output, and being told that it is not sufficient,
that you should actually debug the monster of a program that gcc is
with gdb. To me this would seem absurd, and so does the present
case.
What do you think? Please reply to me even if you choose to copy to
the list (feel free to do that).
--
Ian Zimmerman, Oakland, California, U.S.A.
EngSoc adopts market economy: cheap is wasteful, efficient is expensive.
GPG pub key: 433BA087 9C0F 194F 203A 63F7 B1B8 6E5A 8CA3 27DB 433B A087
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