Hi Stefano, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 01:59:11PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > Do we need to scientifically prove causation here? Oh, you're totally right, we certainly do not need that to *work* on improving bug report handling by maintainers. It just takes that evidence to convince *me* that such aspect is a relevant factor in the decrease of bug reporting rate :-). I digressed on that point simply because Chris was wondering why *I* dismissed that argument quickly.
I suppose Daniel's question was in context, i.e. the statement that poor ITS communications *might* explain a drop in the issue reporting rate. I fail to see any absurdity in Chris's statement, which I rather consider as self-evident. I find the implication that the decline would have a single cause infinitely more preposterous. In particular when that single cause would be the popularity of derivative distributions; although the issue reporting rate is certainly not directly proportional to Debian usage, they must be proportional, so increased usage of derivatives should result in increased (indirect) Debian usage and therefore an increase in our issue reporting rate, unless there are strong opposite effects.
Of course, if anyone is skeptical to the point of doubting that poor ITS communications causes a reduction in the issue reporting rate, before proving causation, it would be a good start to prove correlation, which hasn't even been done so far, as Chris has shown data on the issue reporting rate, but no quantification of ITS communications quality, which may well be increasing, indicating anticorrelation (although my personal feeling doesn't make it too hard for me to accept Chris's assumption).