The impending end of FC2 NEEDINFO bugs...

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 5/26/05, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:
> Mike, I see where you're coming from, but I think this needs to be backed up
> with actual resources from Red Hat to help maintain Fedora Legacy. It's not
> good for the long term to provide a *falsely* positive experience --
> currently, the explicit *plan* from Red Hat / Fedora is that bugs in older
> releases will be ignored, and it seems more honest to tell people WONTFIX
> even if that makes them upset -- unless there actually *will* be resources
> for dealing with the problem.

Sure.. bugs that only affect the older core release.. will be ignored.
No one is arguing that they wont. What Mike is saying, is there needs
to be a way to positivitly encourage people who were experiencing
problems with older releases and lost touch to upgrade and see if the
problem is taken care of in the current release. Its a matter of
perception and priority..is it more important to tailor response to
the release under which the bug was filed.. or is it more appropriate
to see if the problem still exists with the current software?  I'm
pretty confident many Core maintainers would love for people
experiencing weird issues to upgraded to the current release (maybe
even rawhide), re-test and report back. Legacy maintainers of course
have a different desire.

There is a difference between ignoring a bug filed against fc2 because
fc2 is legacy and ignoring the reported problems completely. You don't
want to give novice users the false perception that that developers
aren't interested in fixing the underlying problems at all..in any
release..ever. Unfortunately that is exactly what happens to many
users.. they assume wontfix means 'wontfix ever in any release from
now till the end of time.'  Users need to be gently guided to an
understanding that the primary focus for developers is the development
tree and secondarily the current release of core.  Asking people to
upgrade to the current release and retest prevents users from assuming
the developers are totally uninterested in the problem.

The WONTFIX state screams to some users 'this issue is a waste of my
precious developer time i do not care about this issue and i never
will care about this issue so don't bother refiling it again even if
you do upgrade to the next core and still see the problem.'
It's not rational behavior. Then again I would argue most 'novice
enthusiasts' that make up a large chunk of the incoming fedora
userbase every release..are inherently irrational and maybe we
houldn't expect them to be otherwise.   We can't snap our fingers and
make people behave rationally(not till we have federally mandated
neural implants), but we can do a little bit of social engineering to
make bugzilla work more efficiently as a communication medium.

-jef