Have reached a point where I feel p***ed

[Michael Schwendt]

This is hopelessly moving this thread into a different direction, since
the initial complaint was about lack of communication and lack of
interest, not about a request to report something elsewhere. But:

First, it's the Linux distribution vendor's product, which is broken. It
may be due to bugs in the distributor's config utilities, integration,
compiler tool-chain, build dependencies, source tarball set-up, patches,
whatever. Sometimes it's expected breakage and known already. The
distribution vendor ought to receive a bug report to learn that the
product is broken. Whether it's the chosen upstream release which is
broken, doesn't matter at this point of time. If the upstream software
doesn't suffer from the same bug, this doesn't fix the distribution
vendor's product unless somebody examines the problem and publishes a fix.

Second, serious defects can drive away Joe User. Always remember that. If
the user takes the time to report a bug and also shows the commitment to
stay available for some time, giving additional feedback, answering
questions and collecting requested data, it is even somewhat rude to tell
him to go elsewhere.

Third, becoming familiar with oh-so-many upstream projects and their
custom (and often complex) bug tracking systems (sometimes that is just a
developer mailing-lists where you would need to stay subscribed for a long
time) is nothing many people have interest in. It is not just that you
need to register in many places, it simply doesn't scale either: reviewing
open reports, avoiding duplicates, house-keeping of all the stuff that
piles up over many months, revisiting "My Bugs" in N different trackers
regularly, cross-linking upstream tickets in distributor's bug tracker,
remembering installed work-arounds, and so on.

Fourth, when upstream developers really take the bug report serious (and
not use a different distribution where they believe they are not
affected), the reporter usually is not familiar with upstream's releases
as much as would be required to answer some questions, such as whether a
CVS snapshot or build from source is affected, too. On the contrary, if
upstream believes the bug is specific to the user's Linux distribution
without looking at it thoroughly, the circle closes, or open tickets get
old as everyone moves on due to stalled communication.