Am Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:38:36 -0600 schrieb Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com>:
Not at all. It is statistics. For a long time before the bug wranglers, I personally had to deal with 75% of the Project Manager requests from flyspray. These were all reopen requests, and many of them arguing with the actual choice a developer made. Something like:
Developer: Won't Implement. We want patch in features like this Reopen #1: But it's a good feature and upstream says it will be included soon! Me: Deny. He said he won't implement. Wait for upstream Reopen #2: This should totally be done. Without this patch Arch Linux sucks! Me: Deny
This is slightly different. In this case the developer and you have given the reason for not implementing it, because you as downstream don't want to add a feature by patching the package. This is common and well known Arch policy. And this was not a bug report but a feature request. In my case - I still don't give the links. I don't want to blame a certain developer and I actually don't want to keep on at this certain issue. - a program has worked perfectly in the previous version. After the latest update it didn't work anymore, it was almost completely unusable, without changing the configuration. So it's most likely a bug, and I of course have searched the forums, wiki and the web before reporting the bug. The bug was closed as "works for me" without giving a reason as far as I remember (those comments are not added to the normal comments - should be changed). Something similar already happened with another bug. How do I understand it? What was my reaction? I felt being ignored by the developer. And that's why I sent a reopening request with a not quite friendly comment. Then this reopening request was denied with another unfriendly comment. How do I understand this? What's my reaction? The developer doesn't take my bugs (problems) seriously, isn't willing to look more precisely at the bug, doesn't care if a software is unusable etc. So from my (the reporter's) point of view it's just arrogant and ignorant. In the meantime I know that this all have been misunderstandings. The developer hasn't read my bug report precisely enough and thought that it was again such a bug report where the user hasn't configured his system correctly. I have missed, that my reopening request was denied by another developer to whom the bug wasn't assigned. And I of course know, that the developer in fact wasn't ignorant and arrogant. He rather looked again into this bug and found the problem. This all could have been avoided, if the bug hadn't been closed so early without giving me the chance to respond with a normal comment and if the reopening request would have been answered only by the developer to whom it was assigned. Such misunderstandings can always happen. And such reactions can be prevented by first writing a comment that the developer can't reproduce the bug and asking for more details, or asking if the reporter is sure that he already searched the forums, or whatever. Then I wouldn't have felt being ignored and would have explained in a much friendlier manner why I'm sure that this is a bug and not a configuration issue. I'm not talking about such conversations you mentioned above. But such conversations couldn't completely be avoided. Even if such bug reports can be annoying, a developer shouldn't first think about such users who don't read the documentations, search the forums, want other people to do the user's work, reports invalid bug reports etc. when reading a bug report. And - I repeat myself - think about how the reporter will understand it. So better keep bugs reports open a bit longer than closing them too early. I'm telling this again, because I just want to explain the user's/reporter's point of view, and that such cases could be at least reduced. Just think about it. ;-) Greetings, Heiko