Requests for FC4

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:24:23 -0500, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:

> This is another thing. It would be nice if developers would stop closing
> my bugs when they are not "packaging related".

Be glad if they close your bugs. Worse is when they don't seem to
react on a bug report at all. ;)

> This is usually the case on Fedora.us.

Just because it may have happened to you, doesn't make it "usual".

> I filed a bug on scribus recently and 
> it was closed due to not being "packaging".
> I've filed numerous bugs in firefox when it was still in fedora.us,
> and they got closed as well. 

Depends on what kind of bug you report. If you report something which
asks for Scribus/Firefox application development to be relocated to
fedora.us, then that doesn't make sense. With big interest in an
application, you better report issues upstream. The better your
contact with upstream, the better response you get.

> It seems unreasonable to me
> to expect the user to sign up for 20 different bugzillas
> where you will be told to download the cvs version and retest.

It seems unreasonable to expect volunteer package developers in a
community packaging project to forward every issue upstream, in
particular if it's an RFE or issue where a packager would need to
reimplement big parts or where upstream would likely want to
communicate with the _user_ and not a packager.

Whether commercially oriented Linux distributors handle some bugs
themselves or even place employees in OSS projects directly,
e.g. because they see that it affects their business, that is
something different.

> The burden of bug-tracking should not be on the user.

The burden is not the bug-tracking. Have you ever seen tickets in
bugzilla, which remain open as long as they link to a ticket in
upstream bug tracker?

The burden is to expect that package developers take over not only
reporting an issue upstream, but also answering any questions upstream
developers might have (e.g. steps to reproduce), testing experimental
patches or work-arounds. This creates a requirement for packagers to be
power-users of the software they package. If somebody who knows how to
package software, maintains 20 packages, you ask for a world, where he
(instead of you) has accounts for 20 different bugzillas and takes over
what you consider a burden. What would you do if you had to get Scribus
packages at www.scribus.net, because Fedora Core default Yum
configuration would have a repo entry for upstream's Fedora packages?

-- 
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