closing older bug reports without looking = bad practice ?

[John DeDourek]

Just to add one thought.  There is some additional manpower
out here, but....

As the linux "system" has grown more complex, the gap in
knowledge between the developers and the users has grown.

Consider a bug troubling me at the moment:
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=163417
Bug 163417 basically says that the required /dev/hdd4 device
node for an IDE/ATAPI ZIP drive is not being created
automatically, resulting in some difficulty mounting the drive.

I can spend "some" time on better identifying the cause of
this drive.  I have "some" background in the technologies
to debug such a problem.  I made a search for documentation
which would outline the general way the kernel/driver/udev/
hal/ etc. system should work.  Found lots of stuff on why
udev was good.  But nothing that said overall, architecturally,
this is the way nodes should get created for partitions for a
"removable floppy" with partitions.

Unfortunately, my "some background" is not sufficient to
"read the source".

My thought is that a little tradeoff between development and
documentation time (a little more of the latter) would result
in a greater pool of people providing useful information that
more quickly resolves some of the bugs troubling the linux
system.

Just my own thought.