frustration: mailing lists and bugzilla reports

[John Mizell]

Owen,
I want to let you and everyone at Redhat know that I do appreciate your work and efforts. It seems some forget that this community project is voluntary and some fixes take time due to other constraints.

Thanx,
John Mizell

-----Original Message-----
From: Owen Taylor <otaylor at redhat.com>
Sent: Nov 13, 2003 7:15 AM
To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: frustration: mailing lists and bugzilla reports

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 15:00, Gene C. wrote:
> While this message will ultimately meet the "requirements" for reporting to 
> this list ("is this a bug"==fedora-list, "here is a proposed 
> patch"==fedora-devel-list, and "here are some rpms to 
> test"==fedora-test-list), I am going to take the opportunity to comment on a 
> couple other items.
> 
> First, I can empathize with those posting to this list about bugs rather than 
> fedora-list because the fedora-list has a too low signal-to-noise ratio.  The 
> problem described below has been posted to the fedora-list but has received 
> little in comments.  Few Red Hat folks seem to read the list (noteable 
> exception is Bill Nottingham) and I cannot blame them due to the S/N ratio.

Of you have concerns (or better yet, suggestions!) about the development
process, those are best brought up on fedora-devel. 

Note that "find more time in the day" is not a particularly useful
suggestion ;-(.

Yes, this would have been fixed if we had upgraded gnome-panel to 
2.4.1 right after it came out on October 14... but since that was
after test3, we weren't going to do that without really going through
the changes in detail.

In the ideal world, we'd never ship a release with any ShouldFix
bugs still open. We certainly don't always achieve that. Perhaps for
FC2, some external people can help nag on ShouldFix bugs. It really
does help a lot if somebody posts a list of 

 "Here are 7 ShouldFix bugs where there are outstanding obvious patches"

> Second, I have a question concerning bugzilla reports.  Many reports appear to 
> stay in a "NEW" status for a very long time (sometimes forever).  While some 
> individuals may be away due to circumstances such as vacation, being sick, 
> etc., I would expect that some attention would be paid to these reports.  It 
> is frustrating when they appear to be ignored and the bug continues ... like, 
> why bother reporting it when the report is ignored.

And the question is, what? "Why are you guys slacking off on RH
bugzilla?" Hours in the day, basically. So we can bring you new and
exciting GTK+, Nautilus, D-BUS, whatever features.

I wouldn't obsess about the *state* of a bug; yes, there is a general
policy that bugs should be moved to NEW => ASSSIGNED, once they get
looked at, but that really doesn't have much to do with when they get
fixed.

[ Long saga about panel drawer bug deleted ]

Luckily, fedora policies make it a lot easier to throw gnome-panel-2.4.1
in updates than it's typically been to do a similar thing as a Red Hat
Linux errata.

Regards,
						Owen



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