Reporting bugs upstream

John Ellson ellson at research.att.com
Wed Jan 18 20:41:16 UTC 2006


Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 01:14:44PM -0500, John Ellson wrote:
>
>  > Its incredibly frustrating and demoralizing to report a bug to Fedora, 
>  > only to
>  > have the Fedora maintainer close the bug with the response that the user
>  > (what a dummy!) should have reported it upstream!    Yes, this has 
>  > happened to me.
>  > 
>  > I propose that it be a policy that Fedora maintainers are themselves 
>  > responsible
>  > for forwarding the bug upsteam if necessary.   At the same time the status
>  > of the Fedora bug can be left open with tracking information to the 
>  > upstream bug.
>
> In a lot of cases, users working directly with upstream instead of having
> someone playing middle-man is going to get things turned around a lot
> faster.  Especially in cases where the bug relates to a specific piece
> of hardware, for eg.
>   
Yes, agreed, I'm not suggesting anything that would get in the way of a 
sophisticated
user who is knowledgeable about who is responsible for what in a given 
package
from contacting upstream directly.

I more interested in the general user, or a user unfamiliar with a 
particular package,
having a single-point-of-contact.   I'm interested in not having reports 
discarded and lost just
because they not immediately fixable by the Fedora maintainer.
> What would be *really* awesome would be the possibility of having
> a facility in bugzilla to escalate a bug to upstream, so a couple of
> clicks, and the bug is entered in the appropriate bugzilla, with
> all comments being reflected back into the one the user entered the
> bug into.  I believe there is some work going on in this area, but
> it's slow moving.
>   
That would be great, but I wonder if its overly complicated and perhaps 
thats why its
not happening?

I think most of the problem could be fixed by means of a Fedora Policy, 
and/or
by changing the meaning of "UPSTREAM" status in Bugzilla.

> 		Dave
>
>   
John




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