[arch-general] Bugs again

[James Rayner]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 9:46 PM, Damjan Georgievski <gdamjan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to bring this again,  but something has to change in the way
> bugs are handled in Arch.
>
> I've open this bug report http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13905 about
> the awesome package in community.
>
> The package maintainer just closes the bug, not solving it, claiming
> it's upstream, and not even investigating the problem. He suggests I
> ask upstream.
>
> Ok, I play a good citizen, I do ask upstream, we find the problem, a
> sollution is found - it turns out the PKGBUILD was wrong from the
> begining - but still I submit a patch to awesome so that building it
> is much easier.
>
> I request reopening the bug .. it's a small text-area, not very
> usable, so I just write "New information" .. since the bug was closed
> with "You may want to ask upstream why they install those files by
> default.".
>
> And then I get the answer:
> Reason for denial:
> You need to be more specific that "New information" in a reopen request...
>
> Now, it's not like I enjoy hanging out in the bug system opening bugs,
> investigating them, hoping to improve ArchLinux's packages.. and I
> don't see how I could've deserved this behaviour.
>
> The bug report shouldn't have been closed in the first place, since
> the problem was not even solved.

I don't think bugs should never be closed as "upstream". I think we
have some responsibility to ensure any upstream bug that we receive is
at the least reported upstream.

As soon as an upstream bug is closed as "upstream", then there's an
untracked bug, that may or may not be properly reported upstream.

At the very least, I think some sort of evidence that it has been
reported upstream or an attempt to fix it has been made before closing
such a bug. This way we avoid misunderstandings and the bug remains
tracked.

James