dormant bugs and our perception

William Cattey wdc at MIT.EDU
Wed Jan 2 22:54:50 UTC 2008


John,

Great question earlier in the thread to ascertain scope.  3-4 FTEs to  
address a constant 8000 bug backlog seems eminently addressable.

I agree that involving universities in the bug fixing is an excellent  
approach.
In fact, I'd say that if you had the mentor available, you wouldn't  
need posters.
There are students calling in with problems and solutions all the time.

I think the key is to get those 3-4 FTEs in at the triage level so  
that instead of turning away our seed corn, it begins to grow!

-Bill

----

William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology

N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc at mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/


On Jan 2, 2008, at 11:00 AM, inode0 wrote:

> On Jan 2, 2008 9:23 AM, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, 31 Dec 2007, Jon Stanley wrote:
>>
>>> I was triaging old bugs in the FC6 kernel, and got this back form a
>>> reporter.    While I agree that a lack of response can be  
>>> frustrating
>>> to a reporter, I'm not entirely sure what (if anything) we can do
>>> about it.- I'm sending this to marketing-list since it seems to be a
>>> problem for us rather than QA - though probably both, and I'm sure
>>> alot of us are on both.
>>
>> Handling this exact kind of problem is why bug triagers are worth  
>> their
>> weight in gold.
>>
>> Because here's the thing: people don't expect all of their bugs to be
>> magically fixed.  (Well, some do, but it doesn't make good  
>> business sense
>> or good community sense to cater to unreasonable people.)
>>
>> What they *do* expect is for someone to say, "gee, thanks for  
>> posting this
>> bug, we'll set the priority accordingly and maybe poke a  
>> developer."  And
>> we fail pretty miserably at that.
>>
>> Cross-posting to the Fedora advisory board list.  Our inability to  
>> create
>> and nurture a bug triage community continues to be painful, and our
>> current QA resources within Red Hat continue to be (necessarily)
>> technically focused rather than community focused.  This is a  
>> problem we
>> need to solve.
>
> I know ideas are a dime a dozen but here is one idea anyway ...
>
> We've been discussing how universities can take a more active role in
> helping students find suitable open source projects to participate in
> and ways they can find a fit between their skills and the needs of
> open source projects elsewhere.
>
> I think it would be immensely helpful to those of us at universities
> who don't have a lot of direct access to students to have one
> marketing tool available to us ... an eye-catching poster that we
> could scatter around campus ... perhaps containing a short list of
> fedora needs that don't require a lot of technical skill and an empty
> spot where we might add some mentor contact information for anyone
> interested.
>
> John
>
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