An interesting read when discussing what to do about our bugs...

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 19:29 -0300, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-01-19 at 20:36 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > > On Jan 19, 2008 9:23 AM, nodata <lsof at nodata.co.uk> wrote:
> > > > I'm talking about closing the bug and telling the reporter to report
> > > > upstream, i.e. "go away".
> 
> > > As a package maintainer, what would you like me to do in situations
> > > where I need the reporter to talk to upstream?
> 
> > A reporter should never be supposed to talk upstream, because he is
> > reporting an issue a problem with the product (your package) you are
> > supposed to be responsible for, not against the product an upstream
> > ships to you (the source tarball).
> 
> It might very well happen that the packager can't reproduce the problem
> (doesn't have the exact hardware, whatever).
Yes, it _might_ happen, nobody denies this, but ...

... this is far from being the rule/norm.

Often reporters are ordinary user, who actually don't have much clues
about an application's internals, who "just reports something" he
considers to be a "bug" or an application "misbehavior". Forcing them to
"go upstream" would mean to push them into a forum they often aren't
really interested to participate in nor competent enough to participate.

Ralf